Zuzebox’s Blog takes a look at the Motorola 6809 microprocessor from the early 1980s.

Motorola’s 6809 is often said to be the best of the 8-bit microprocessors that came out of the 1970’s.

But it came a little too late for the first personal revolution and home computer scene that followed. As almost all computers from this time used either the 6502 or the Z80. Which is a shame because it was a really good microprocessor and many including myself consider it the best 8-bit microprocessor ever made.

Tandy Color Computer and Color Computer II, the Dragon 32 and 64 and the awesome Vectrex video console. As well as numerous video arcade machines. And finally it was also considered for the Apple Macintosh and was used in a very early proof of concept design.

Read more including lots of source links in the post here.

Ed. note: I selected the 6809 microcontroller for a speech synthesis project I built in 1985 in my senior year at Caltech and a project for interfacing to a synthetic aperture radar for JPL. A very nice chip.