On Friday 07 September 2001 02:14 pm, Gary Fisher wrote:

> Sounds like you're in the market for a Kay Dynabook.  <G>

Sure. Got one?

> You mention running Squeak under Linux, which is certainly a fine choice,
> but I wonder if a "specialized general purpose machine" of the PDA class
> could reasonably be built to run Squeak native? 

Do you mean to interpret Squeak bytecodes? I suspect that it would take some 
interesting manipulation to write an interrupt handler in Squeak, or to write 
the actual kernel (GC and all)...

There's got to be a reason that the Lisp machines etc. of the '80's are no 
longer being made. Maybe it's just the death of the AI industry, or maybe 
people found that they couldn't keep up with the performance of Intel's 
general-purpose chips. Maybe it's just economics.

It's never been easier for the garage hacker to make his own processor, with 
high-density FPGAs and CPLDs easily available. There are even free tools 
available for these.

I see Linux or WinCE or whatever as more a packaging scheme for hardware 
drivers and filesystems than anything else. Using them I can get Other 
People's Code to do these things.

-- 
Ned Konz
currently: Stanwood, WA
email:     ned at bike-nomad.com
homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com