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Old 04-11-2008, 09:04 PM
sje sje is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2006
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The Unicorn Electronics link is inviting, but I checked and all of their catalog pages are at least a year old. So maybe the stock counts are not really up to date.

If someone uses GPL code but never releases the product, then they're in the clear.

Until the advent of the fairly well specified PCI bus, all earlier microcomputer buses were either too slow, too big (VME), proprietary (IBM micro-channel), or just plain crap (S-100, ISA). The only exception is the MIT NuBus that was used in the early slot days of Macintosh computers, and even that bus was a little slow (33 MHz).

It would be possible to run Unix/Linux on a 4 KB 8080 with enough mass storage; simply write a small interpreter that's powerful enough to run an interpreter for a 68K or some other process, and have that interpreter run the OS and applications. Maybe it would be better to have 16 KB 8080 and only run one interpreter. I've heard of one Mac enthusiast who ran a PowerPC interpreter on an ancient 68K Mac and it boots OS/X. It runs a couple hundred times slower than the real thing.
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