Editing Motorola 88000 (section)

===Background===
Motorola entered the 1980s in a position of strength; the company's recently-introduced [[Motorola 68000]] easily outperformed any other microprocessor on the market, and its 32-bit architecture was naturally suited to the emerging [[workstation]] market. [[Intel]] was not moving aggressively into the 32-bit space, and the companies that did, notably [[National Semiconductor]], botched their releases and left Motorola in control of everything that was not [[Intel]]. At the time, Intel held about 80% of the overall computer market, while Motorola controlled 90% of the rest.

Into this came the early 1980's introduction of the RISC concept. At first, there was an intense debate within the industry whether the concept would actually improve performance, or if its longer [[machine language]] programs would actually slow the execution through additional memory accesses. All such debate was ended by the mid-1980s when the first RISC-based workstations emerged; the latest [[Sun-3|Sun-3/80]] running on a 20&nbsp;MHz [[Motorola 68030]] delivered about 3 MIPS, whereas the first [[SPARC]]-based [[Sun-4|Sun-4/260]] with a 16&nbsp;MHz [[SPARC]] delivered 10 MIPS. [[Hewlett-Packard]], [[Digital Equipment Corporation|DEC]] and other large vendors all began moving to RISC platforms.

This shift in the market had the potential to lock Motorola out of the workstation market, one of its only strongholds and among its most lucrative. Apple remained the company's only large vendor outside the workstation space; other users of the 68000, notably [[Atari Corporation]] and [[Commodore International]], were floundering in a market that was rapidly standardizing on [[IBM PC compatible]]s.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/ |title=Total share: 30 years of personal computer market share figures |first=Jeremy |last=Reimer |website=Ars Technica|date=15 December 2005 }}</ref>