On Monday 23 August 2004 09:25 am, Karel Kulhav� wrote: > It's only good. Breadboards suck. Airwire into a tin can is better > IMHO ;-)
Agreed. But they come in handy for quick one-offs and prototypes. Same with wire-wrapping. > > Again, I don't fear SMT. Those $22 superscalar MIPS processors are > > awfully appealing to me, and as long as I build for myself > > exclusively, the idea of using $100 FPGA chips isn't that bad to me > > (seeing as how it'll probably replace at least that much cost in > > combined board space and discrete components anyhow). > > Is it possible to compile Linux on such a bugger? I don't see why not. But my chipset wasn't going to be "Standard" though, so device drivers and peripheral interfaces would need to be changed. Otherwise, it's very much possible. However, my interests lie elsewhere (e.g., Forth). As I said, I (and my customers) am looking for a computer that is instant-on, no muss, no fuss, no multi-user bull. Besides, unless you're really, really careful, Linux can suck resources as fast as Windows now-a-days. Also, how Linux handles shared libraries can only be described as utterly retarded. The Unix-inspired architecture is definitely starting to show its age. The user of this machine should not have to be a system administrator. Elementary OS and language built into ROM (both of which Forth provides trivially), so that the computer is at least usable for something even without a disk drive of any kind, even though it will have an IDE interface. Of course, a more sophisticated, more feature-complete OS can be loaded from disk if one is present. Like I said -- something along the lines of a Commodore 64. And don't tell me to use the Commodore 64 as a base; not only are they becoming increasingly scarce, but increasingly impractical as well. The whole point to this project is to explore what computing would be like if technology marched on, but we still considered the needs of the *home* computer user. -- Samuel A. Falvo II
