Re: MISC personal computers
I goes it all depends on:
1. marketing
2. How fed up people becomes on using Microsoft and Apple products, the
main achievements of each is that it now needs a 100MIPS machine to run to
do the same things as wordprocessing, spreadsheet, fax and email which was
doing quite OK on a 386 with 640K of memory!
The revolution has to come from the consumers.
The first step is for someone to come up ( and I am sure that it is not at
all difficlut) with a MISC CPU based system that can run
wordprocessing/spreadsheet, send and receive faxes, and browse the net, AND
does it much faster than the PCs running Win95 or MacOS. I am sure that
such a PC can be less than $500.
In this regard I read that the i21 processor from iTV Corporation can be
supplied for $12 with Internet accessing software and Forth OS (in
quantities of 250K), the issue being there is currently no one that can
give iTVc an order for 250K of this chip, with the result that it costs
around $500 or so per chip!
My person feeling is that the MISC community is not geared up to to the
marketing required. I myself has been trying to get more information on the
iTVc processor for an Interactive TV project I am involved in, which can
literally take millions of these chips! But other than a few emails in the
begining the folks at iTVc seems to have gone silenet suddenly, almost
coinciding with my offer to wanting to purchase their reference design for
the internet device so that I can evaluate it! MISC certainly has good
potential, but it needs to be supported by people (in these compannies) who
are also focused on getting information out to all those who asks for it!
Unless we get the word out, there will be no takers. As for myself I right
now have a window of 60 days to decide what processor to use in the next
generation of the Interative TV settop box (using cable-TV network), and I
would very much like to try out the i21 processor, but I really do not have
sufficient information (not to talk about an actual device) to test out!
For whatever reasons we are right now using the Motorola ColdFire (a $10
processor without any software) and really need to move away from it fot
our next generation.
MISC community needs to help itself first
Regards...Das
At 11:08 PM 2/6/99 -0500, you wrote:
> Does anyone think that a personal computer with a MISC CPU would become
>popular? That is, a machine designed for home use, with a GUI, a
>Forth-based OS, and all. I guess what I am asking is: could MISC one day
>supplant the PC as the dominant computer in the home? :) I am very
>interested in this subject.
>
>
>
