Motorola M68000 Family
The Motorola 68000 family (also 680x0, 68K, etc) is a series of VLSI mircroprocessors. Although the first in the series (the MC68000) was described as a "16-bit microprocessor", the family (which are generally compatible at the object code level) is generally considered to be 32-bit. The 68K family is a CISC architecture.
During their lifetiem (in the 1980s and early 1990s), they were popular, initially in small time-sharing systems, and then workstations (e.g. the Sun workstation) and finally in personal computers (notably the Apple Macintosh.
In the latter role, their primary competition was the Intel x86 microprocessor line. They are no longer used in personal computers, but derivatives are still in wide use in embedded systems.
Motorola ceased development of the 68000 family in 1994, when they moved to the Motorola 88000 family of RISC processsors, and soon thereafter the PowerPC family, in collaboration with IBM and Apple Computer.
