Re: lean + mean

[Luis Commins <Luis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I know the feeling!! I am hoping to capture some of the flavour with the HiSpec project ( www.anachreon.com/hispec ) though I haven't touched that for a while now. There seems to be a lot of marketing 'overheads' with a lot of the stuff currently on the market, pricing on 'what the market will bear' and all that. I just want something simple, pluggable and powerful. I was planning on using the F21 but the cost is way over what I can afford for a test unit though I've got a few MuP21 I hope to mess with some time.
Yes, it looks like the MISC list is a refuge for some of those ideals, but I doubt it is the only one.
The 'Jupiter Ace' had a Forth on ROM, not BASIC!! I recently saw one in a second hand shop near where I work, they were asking for £140...looks like a ZX81 in white with blue keypads.

I think a lot of it had to do with 'openess': They were simple and easy to code for, no 'BIOS', no APIs!! APIs may be handy but it's another 'hurdle' to go through. I liked the idea of having the display directly mapped on the memory, clean and simple.

Look at the Transputer, no longer to be produced (was created by INMOS) with all that power. Hell, I'd even use a DSP!! I'm working on a new approach ('cos the F21 is way too much $) and I'm hoping to get 1BIPs for about £30 out of the system, hmmm...now where's that empty bottle of washing up liquid...

Luis.


>>> "vic plichota" <atsvap@cgo.wave.ca> 20/07/99 15:03:03 >>>
Someone threw away a Commodore C-64 in my back alley yesterday;  I
could not resist taking my screwdriver, and cracking it open to see
what was under the hood -- amazing to see the high quality, and doing
so much with so little...  rather like the Timex/Sinclair ZX-81
(which used FORTH to implement BASIC).

Where, oh where is the "maximize your bang-per-buck" methodology gone
to, these days?  Is the MISC list the last refuge?


cheers   - vic