= History =
Motorola developed the 68000 in the late 1970s to compete with emerging 16‑bit designs and to counter the limitations of 8‑bit microprocessors like the Motorola 6800. Motorola was aware that Intel was working on a 16-bit extension of their 8080 series, which would emerge as the Intel 8086. They knew that if they launched a product similar to the 8086, within 10% of its capabilities, Intel would outperform them in the market. Another 16-bit would not do, their design would have to be bigger, and that meant having some 32-bit features.
In designing the 68000, Motorola’s team (led by figures such as Tom Gunter) adopted a strategy of using a 32‑bit instruction set with a 16‑bit ALU to balance performance with production cost and complexity. The result was a processor that offered a large, flat address space without segmentation and supported a rich set of operations—qualities that made it suitable for both desktop systems and embedded applications.