Motorola 68000 Educational Computer Board

The Motorola 68000 Educational Computer Board was a development board for the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, introduced by Motorola in 1981. It featured the 68K CPU, memory, I/O devices and built-in educational and training software.

Hardware

CPU: 4-MHz Motorola 68000
random [access memory|RAM]: 32KB
ROM: 16KB
9600 baud serial port for dumb terminal connection
9600 baud serial port for host computer connection
Parallel port for communication and printer connection
Audio output for Magnetic tape [data storage|tape storage]
24-bit programmable interval timer
Wire-wrap area for custom circuitry
Required power voltages: -12V, +5V and +12V

Software

The board has built-in 16K ROM memory containing assembly/disassembly/stepping/monitoring software called TUTOR. The software was operated using command-line interface over a serial link, and provided many commands useful in machine code debugging. Memory contents could be dumped via a serial link to a file on the host computer. The file was transferred in Motorola's S-Record format. Similarly, files from host could be uploaded to the board's arbitrary user memory area.

Price

The price of the Motorola ECB at launch was which was relatively inexpensive for a computer with an advanced for that time 16/32-bit CPU.

Use

According to the manual, for basic use only a dumb terminal and power source are required. However, it seems that in colleges the board was predominantly used in connection with a time-sharing host computer to teach assembly language programming and other computer science subjects.