In message <3FB825CD.3CCF93DE at starpower.net>
          Alan Grimes <alangrimes at starpower.net> wrote:

> Hello, 
> 
> Today I'm writing as an entrepreneur trying to assemble a business plan.
> I'm trying to guage how much it would cost/how much you would charge to
> accomplish the following two milestones: 
> 
> 1. make a bootable, self-building (no more C) VM for a reasonably
> well-designed machine (that is not a PC). including a filesystem and
> interrupt driven IO.
I can offer some thought on this part, having done something like it
several times.

Avoiding C might be more trouble than it is worth. Unless you really,
truly, have a setup where it cannot be used, don't just throw it out.
Building a total compiler is not impossible (I have code for one
successful example on my website) but is tricky and costs a good deal
of maintenance work to keep up to date. You have to be able to generate
the code (duh) and insert it into memory in a way that doesn't upset
the OS (does this machine have one?) and manage the cache(s).

Not having a preexisting GUI is actually a benefit in my opinion because
you can take over the machine and actually make use of hardware
interrupts to drive the IO. You get to drive the display directly as
well which is nice until you need 2/3D hardware acceleration. Had fun
writing device drivers recently? It's like banging your head against a
spiked brick wall but worse.

Theres a non-trivial amount of work for all this. More details need for
anything better than an estimate of "you must give me One Million
Dollars" (white cat not included, offer void where prohibited by lore
etc)

  
> 
> 2. make scamper W3C compliant and give it sufficient capabilities to be
> a viable if not prefferable alternative to Internet Exploder.
THat's a scary spec to ponder. My guess is LOTS of work. Think how many
people work on the big browsers.


tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- All booster, no payload.