4 Silicon wafer collectors set, Very Rare Motorola 68000 CPU wafer and chip

  

This sale is for a quantity of one four inch (100mm) Motorola 68000 GN7 mask CPU wafer and one matching packaged chip in gold and purple ceramic. The wafer is in excellent condition and so is the packaged chip. It comes with the fluoroware clamshell case shown. These are the same CPUs used in the original 1984 Apple Macintosh computer. This is really a museum grade set.

I've decapped an identical chip for the inside die photos. As you can see the wafer and the die inside the chip are both the GN7 mask versions.

You can see the same mask number 68000 on the computer history museum's 1984 Mac board. I'm sorry to all those great customers, but there have been too many and my memory grows short.

I hope those of you still searching find this. The Motorola 68000 was one of the most popular CPUs of it's day and a real pleasure to work with. I liked the linear address space and in the mid 1980s the 16 bit data bus could move data like nothing we'd seen before. Even assembly programming was fairly simple, because it had a large instruction set.

I found that the assembly was easy to learn and powerful. Even though it lacked a floating point unit, a carefully crafted multiply and shift would do high precision division in just a few clock cycles. A trick I learned from a master software engineer I was fortunate enough to have worked with. The colors of the microscopic films and circuits vary dramatically with lighting and viewing angle. These photos were made in ordinary white room lighting and are not color enhanced.