Motorola

Motorola was established in 1928. The company created numerous products, for example two-way radios, but in the context of the Computer History Wiki the most interesting products were produced by the semiconductor division.

• 6800 8-bit microprocessor, 1974
• 68000 16/32-bit microprosessor, 1980
• 88000, m88k, 32-bit RISC microprocessor, 1988

Motorola also produced all kinds of TTL integrated circuits. Motorola was also the first vendor to produce integrated circuits based on ECL, a process originally invented by IBM.

The original Motorola company was split in 2011. The semiconductor division was separated out before that, into On Semiconductor in 1999. The MC68K architecture is today maintained by Freescale which was spun off from Motorola in 2004. Freescale itself was acquired by NXP Semiconductors in late 2015, so presumably NXP Semiconductors are now responsible for keeping MC68K alive.

Motorola has also been manufacturing Single Board Computers (SBCs), and still continues to do so. A VME-based series has been in continuous production since 1988, and are or have been based around MC68K, M88K, and PowerPC CPUs.