I'm not sure I'm the one being combative, to be honest. So far Intel at the time seemed to think this was a design bug with significant enough consequences that they decided fixing it in some unused part of the mask. And I just agree with that.

I've been privy to such discussions myself, albeit in modern times. I'm familiar with silicon engineers and kernel engineers coming together to discuss a CPU bug or design mishap, and coming up with all sorts of crazy workarounds. Until it's eventually decided that this is just too much to inflict, and it's fixed.

Since you are interested in the 68000 thing, I think I do know the details and can explain, because I have before looked at the difference between the 68000 and the 68010 that makes paging possible. Let's look at the 68010 manual here: http://www.bitsavers.org/components/motorola/68000/MC68010_6...

(Notice how it already says "VIRTUAL MEMORY MICROPROCESSORS" on the front while the 68000 manual in the same directory does not, though I suppose it could be a good marketing move if there was an actual unintended bug, and Motorola decided to advertise the fix as a new CPU?)

Page 5-12:
"Bus error exceptions occur when external logic terminates a bus cycle with a bus error signal. Whether the processor was doing instruction or exception processing, that processing is terminated, and the processor immediately begins exception processing."

It specifies external logic, which would be the MMU in the interesting cases. Everyone not using an MMU did not care, and bus errors were still valuable with or without MMU to signal illegal accesses and crash the program that caused it. The full problem is elaborated on the next page: "The value of the saved program counter does not necessarily point to the instruction that was executing when the bus error occurred, but may be advanced by up to five words. This is due to the prefetch mechanism on the MC68010 that always fetches a new instruction word as each previously fetched instruction word is used (see 7.1.2 Instruction Prefetch)."

The 68010 fixed it by adding enough (opaque, undocumented) internal state for the CPU on the stack to effectively undo what it did so far and restart the instruction, that state is shown (without detail, and subject to change between revisions) on the diagram.

The 68000 manual simply says: "Although this information is not sufficient in general to effect full recovery from the bus error, it does allow software diagnosis" (which should include a multitasking OS killing the task and proceeding), and none of the internal state exists on the stack.

But you may still well be right that Motorola did intend for bus errors to be restartable and failed. They would not say so explicitly in the manual of course.

But from what I can see this still only affected systems with an MMU, and then only if they wanted to do full virtual memory including paging. SINIX on the PC-D did not, they were content with swapping and merely detecting illegal accesses, like other UNIXes at the time. The 8086 problem affected everyone, including in application code.

If you know more than what I've cobbled together and can elaborate, I'd be extremely interested in it, because the Apollo DN100 hack always fascinated me to no end (as should be obvious).