The First 8-bit microprocessor with a multiply instruction. It had a 16-bit internal architecture that allowed certain registers to be accessed as either a 16 or 8-bit register.

First produced by Motorola, an enhanced version of it called the 6309 is still available from Hitachi.

Back in the '80's my mother (yes, my good ol' mummy) built a computer using the Motorola 6809 processor. The circuit diagrams she photocopied from some techo friends of hers, also ham radio jockeys and technophiles. The parts she purchased from Radio Shack and auctions. She was particularly skilled at pretending to be a ditzy female when it came to buying these parts, to the point of telling the Radio Shack staff that she liked particular components because "they looked pretty" or "she didn’t have one of them and thought she might find a use for it one day". In this way she received huge discounts and walked away with vital components at next to nothing. At auctions she would buy boxes of junk because there were one or two bits that she needed in them. The rest of the bits she would sell to the others that were bidding for the same items, and more often than not make a profit.

By the mid-80's we were the only house in the area with a computer. It was built into the cabinet of one of the first televisions to come into the country. It had a 13" black and white screen, and the back of it folded out and hung on bits of green twine to allow the boards to stay cool.

It had a 360Kb 5.25" floppy drive, and ran a version of BASIC (after the 15-20 minute boot-up off the boot floppy ). I taught myself BASIC programming, but could go no further with this machine - it had got me into computing and I went from there.

My mother, having started down the path of computers later bought computers of varying shapes and sizes, and still owns them to this day - a veritable museum of computer history:

...all thanks to Motorola and their 6809 chip, and my mum's brilliance!

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