The MC68000 was the first member of Motorola's very successful family of 16- and 32-bit processors. Introduced in 1979 it was actually a 32 bit architecture
internally, but had a 16 bit data bus and 24 bit address bus to fit in a 64 pin package. It was used in a wide variety of computers at that time, including
the
Commodore Amiga,
Apple Macintosh,
Atari ST and the original Sun and SGI UNIX machines,
but also several game consoles like
Sega Genesis/MegaDrive,
NeoGeo and many arcade machines were based on the MC68000. It also had a great success as a controller, chosen by many medical manufacturers
and printer manufacturers like HP, Printronix and Adobe because of its low cost, convenience, and good stability.
Variants of the 68000 include the 68HC000 (a low-power HCMOS implementation, 0.13-0.26 W compared to 1.2 W NMOS) and the 68EC000 with selectable 8 or 16 bit data bus.