The ostensible purpose of the newsletter was to promote Hal's company's line of 68000-based hardware and software.
However, Hal never let that get in the way of telling a good story or explaining how to design or build a fast computer.
The logic circuitry required to pulse DTACK high to add these delays could be fairly complex.
When many different peripherals with different maximum speed capabilities must be used in a small system, another solution to keep DTACK grounded is to slow down the clock rate of the CPU so that all memory and peripheral devices can transfer data at the (reduced) maximum speed of the CPU.
In turn, using a lower CPU clock frequency enables a simpler, less expensive circuit board design, with fewer layers, to be used successfully.
Many other microprocessors, including the Intel 8086, 8088, 80286, 80386, 8080, 8085, Zilog Z80, and 6502 family, each have an input pin that serves a similar function to DTACK, but it is usually named READY or RDY.
It typically contained the assembly source code for high performance math subroutines.