Re: Author comment -- could you lot miss the point any more widely?
Quote:
What I was saying is this:
As we now have effectively-free super-simple hardware, we now need free, super-simple software to go with it.
End quote
The thing is that this is a falsehood - what we have is effectively-free *complex* hardware, not simple hardware. Look at an RPi; the SoC alone has more transistors on it than were present in the entirety of a BBC Micro with the ARM Evaluation System co-processor, with several different types of processing core (ARM cores, VideoCore QPUs, VideoCore VPUs, and any tiny cores embedded in there), lots of I/O hardware, dedicated memory access hardware for texture sampling, and a whole lot more.
Other hardware isn't much different, as modern SoCs have huge numbers of cheap transistors available, so you can build an incredibly complex machine for very little money. The only reason the OberonStation bucks this trend is that it's not built around a SoC; it's built around an expensive (relatively speaking) Spartan-3 FPGA.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
