“Quality is not an act, it is a habit.”
The Story
Motorola's 68000 processor (1979) was the CPU that powered the golden age of personal computing. The original Apple Macintosh, the Commodore Amiga, the Atari ST, the Sega Genesis, early Sun and HP workstations, and the Sharp X68000 all ran on 68000-family processors. Its clean, orthogonal instruction set and flat memory model made it the preferred target for C compilers — and the platform where a generation of developers learned systems programming.
In 1986, Motorola engineer Bill Smith created Six Sigma — a quality methodology that used statistical process control to reduce manufacturing defects to 3.4 per million opportunities. Originally designed for semiconductor fabrication, Six Sigma spread to software development, where it influenced the creation of CMMI, ISO 9001 for software, and the quality metrics that enterprise software organizations still use.
Why They're in the Hall
Motorola is in the museum for the tension between its two contributions. The 68000 processor made personal computing accessible and powerful — creating the platforms where millions of developers wrote their first programs, including their first bugs. Six Sigma attempted to bring manufacturing-level quality discipline to an industry that resists it. The gap between Motorola's quality ambition and the software industry's actual practices is a direct expression of Katie's Law: statistical quality control requires measurement, measurement requires effort, and the lazier path is to ship and patch.