A Killer App on a non-Consumer MC68000-based Platform (opens in new tab)

In 1986 Cognex developed an industrial machine vision killer app—software so valuable that customers bought the platform on which it ran in order to run the app. The platform was the Motorola 68000-based Cognex 2000, and the software was called Search. At the time we did not understand that we had a killer app (the term itself would not be coined for another two years)—we were just trying to solve one specific problem for one customer. But it didn’t take long for us, and for the market, to re...