The ghost of Macintosh Quadra's past.

21 December 2022
Whoops: Linux's strcmp() For The m68k Has Always Been Broken - Phoronix
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-...-Always-Broken

Linux for 68k Macintoshes download | SourceForge.net
https://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-mac68k/

On a personal note:

Eons ago, I used a maxed-out, Macintosh Quadra 800 to record the output of a mediocre sounding yet easy to use 1995-era Yamaha QY-300.

59m47s
May 17, 2012
yamaha qy300 full tutorial - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsR2UX3axNM

The results?

John Gary Bovay - Melodies! (Headphone Mix) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/jamendo-025781

Building upon the QY-300 provided experience, I got my first computer followed by eventually encountering Ubuntu 9.04 and the Internet in 2008 while in my 40's.

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Wow! Nobody caught this until now? The amazing part is that it might have been broken "going back to the original Linux/m68k port". Any idea when that was? The "Linux/m68k Home Page" seems to have been last updated in 2000!

I've no idea. I thought that m68k machines had long ago been relegated to the status of collectors' items and household conversation pieces.

Until I read the above Phoronix article, I had no idea Linux ever ran on hardware that old.

Interestingly, Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon's Software Manager offers some 55 m68k-related OS components. Perhaps emulation is now a better way forward.

I always admired the architecture of the M68000 family of processors. It is clean. Compared to it, the x86 family is a train wreck.

Me too. The first was out in 1979 IIRC, well before the competition. They also had the sense to upsize to a 68pin package. It's probable that the wrong CPU was chosen for IBM's original PC. There even was a 16bit version with an 8 bit data bus (The 68008). Such things were necessary back in the day because 16bit CPU support chips weren't about in 1980/81, and that's when the PC parts were specified.

I'll add my 'me too'. At work, all the boards we used for real-time SCADA and Comm RTU systems was 68xxx VME based, after the Z80. The last processor that we used for our own designed CPU board was the 68332. Of course development was done on x86 PCs with cross compilers/assemblers back then. To speed things up on the PCs we even had Definicon 68020 co-processor boards for some of the master systems.