areas of study for use in misc mup21 and f21 applications

["GARY B. LAWRENCE" <garyl@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wish to know what specific areas of study will be useful in using the
MUP21 and the F21 chip. For instance - I saw a good technical book on 
networks at Barnes and Noble written at MIT. I wondered if such a book 
would help in development of different types of networks with the F21.
 It appears to me that the F21 is the best single chip network
processor. I think of using F21 chips in small ring networks with 
one or two chips acting as gateways to other chips on different rings. 
A possible application would be to hook these rings to a linux or unix 
server to the internet and set up a game played over the internet using
Forth or java on the client side and the F21s on the server side. The 
cost per node would be less than a pc capable of 100 integer mips with 
a network card. Such a system might have something like different rooms
of a Doom type game done on each separate F21 or each one hooked to a
ide cdrom for individual lookup. The performance on the server side may
not be transferable to the client side thru a modem but the ability to 
expand the server side performance at lower cost would be impressive. 
 Another type of system which should benefit from the use of a cheap 
network array is a robotic system. It is discouraging to think that we
cannot build a robot that matches the ability of the primitive
cockroach. Use of a chip like the F21 may help in some ways. Using a 
stress guage and the analog section of the F21 one might be able to 
 sense the weight on one leg of an six or eight legged insect. The same
leg may need other F21s to sense position and do local motor control. 
 These processors could be hooked in a local net for fast single leg 
adjustment, and to a another net to the main processor. It appears to me
that robotics would be able to take a major step forword with a
processor like the F21. 100 mips, network processor on chip and some 
analog processing would lower the cost of the individual nodes of a
robot. If memory serves me, I believe some primative animals and even
large dinosaurs had or have a second brain further down the spinal cord 
 so the use of networked brain function has been shown to be used in
some animals. 
  Another place networked processors could be used is in a new operating 
system design.  Unix was a system designed using C as the system
building language and Unix was designed to be multiuser and
multitasking. The reason for using a C compiler at the time was because
processor time was expensive and it was thought that compiled languages
 produced the best compromise between speed and program development.
 A complex operating system and 20 or so users seemed at the time to 
be the best use of a very expensive computer. But now one F21 has many
times the power of a PDP 8 or so and it is not hard to see one person 
using 10 F21s for a price comparable to a midprice pc clone. I would
like to see experimental systems in which one F21 is used for the code
development and others are used for other operating system functions, 
such as object oriented disk system, flowchart display, debugging tools, 
print rendering, and graphics display. 
 	Any thoughts on these or other subjects?