Great, great post, Ned.  I was wondering last night, after reading the amazingly cool "Squeak History / TinyMachines" thread, how hard it would be to build a new processor/system solution.  

Ohhhhhh, this sounds cool.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Ned Konz [mailto:ned at bike-nomad.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2003 11:54 AM
To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Subject: Why so few garage processors? (was Re: Squeak History /
TinyMachines)


On Tuesday 18 March 2003 02:24 pm, Alan Kay wrote:
> At 6:40 PM -0300 3/18/03, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
> >I have been learning a lot trying to fit Smalltalk into 15
> > thousand gates (http://www.merlintec.com:8080/Hardware/Oliver)
> > and feel that my larger projects will be far better because of
> > this.
>
> Well, IIRC, the first ARM that Tim did so many neat things with was
> only about 25,000 transistors (and the Alto was a lot less than
> that).

It used to be that you had to work for a big company to be able to 
design high-performance processors and systems.

But today, with the average $1000 computer having considerably more 
power than the CAD workstations of just a few years ago, we can do 
these designs ourselves.

I wonder why we don't see more innovative processor/system solutions 
coming from individuals now that the (financial) cost of entry for 
making fast, capable systems is almost $0.

[snip]