Thought this might interest those who remember when “Linux on a Mac” meant something very different. This m68k port is still alive and kicking: http://www.linux-m68k.org/
Anyone here ever run it back in the day, or still got hardware that could?
I’ve used a couple of Motorola 6800 and 68000 based systems; I believe the 6800 ones were PC based and the 68000 ones were small tower form Unix systems; Sun had one early version and I believe that Apple may have also briefly experimented with them in early Mac prototypes, but didn’t continue using the chip. Intel really started pushing their various 86 lines of microprocessors on the low end and RISC processors began emerging on the high end, so I don’t think the 68000 got much work in consumer stuff with a computer interface but they may have had a place in chip-based electronics, not sure about that.
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Honestly before my time, so it’s cool to hear from someone who actually ran those Motorola and Sun boxes. Did the 68000 Unix towers feel like proper workstations back then or more like glorified terminals?
When I searched online just now I found this old related article from 1982:
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Interesting that you found the NCR Tower. I believe that was precisely the model I was using; I had a former conference room devoted to them, and I stopped wearing suits because I was crawling on the ground a lot, switching network interface connections between the Tower units I had in my small lab and 2, 3, or 4 different networks that I connected these units to as part of my testing. I had some IBM mainframes in multiple sites, a development and test system, UNIX, desktop PCs and a few odd interfaces to test with.
It was that assignment that gave me the experience to move on as a UNIX expert, joining a telecommunications systems engineering organization at Digital a few years later. Yes, I also had brief encounters with Motorola 6800 and 68000 PCs; I think Altos had at least one Motorola model and I tried out an early Sun OS with Motorola 68000 before they joined forces with AT&T to build Sun Solaris with a new set of RISC based chips.
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The Atari ST, the Atari TT, the Atari Falcon and the Commodore Amiga also had an 68000 CPU.
Lesser known is the Sinclair QL with a 68008 processor.
Especially the Commodore Amiga was a very popular consumer product.
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I used to own a Sun Sparcstation 10 at home, connected to a Sun mass storage device around the year 2000. It was dumped by a company that switched to Windows NT servers.
Worked like a champ, but the mass storage device…oh dear..
It was big, I mean, it was about 80x80x50 cm. It had 16 bays for full height 5 1/4" SCSI disks, A SCSI CD ROM drive and 12 sturdy full speed running fans. It was a heavy beast.
The mass storage cabinet was loud !! It always sounded like a jet airplane taking off. The only way to work in the same room with it was with a good set of earplugs 
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