Motorola and Me

The Motorola family of microprocessors has always been my favorite ever since I came to know what a microprocessor was, somewhere about the early 1980's. I remember comparing the M6800 to the current Intel MPU on the market at time in competition with the M6800. My favorite thing about the Motorola family was the way the MPU did addressing in a linear fashion and the flexibility that came with that,especially mapping I/O. I also liked the early mnemonics that the M6800 had.

My exposure to the M6800 came in a class at "State Technical Institute at Memphis". We built a small computer on "bread-boards". The schematic was supplied by our instructor. We would write our code on a PDP-11/44, cross-compile it and download it to the bread-boarded M6800 to run and debug. I enjoyed bread-boarding and always wanted to make it a work of art. I don't have a picture of my completed M6800 computer with the wire-wrap sockets and IC's on it but I did get a photo of the bread- boards and the jumper wires. (see below)

Naturally, I liked playing with my new found interest and decided to take it to the next level, this time wire-wrapping. I changed the memory mapping a little. My instructor recompiled the monitor program to accomodate my latest creation, burned my EPROMs and off I went. The next six photos show my new work of art.