On Mon, 12/14/15, Ethan Dicks <ethan.di...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 2:05 PM, Mike <tulsamike3...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Dec 14, 2015, at 12:34 PM, Chuck Guzis <ccl...@sydex.com> wrote: >>> >>> The subject brought up the thought of how many display-less >>> computers we encounter every day without giving it a >>> thought. I think that probably 100 would be a safe bet. >> >> .... if you think about it almost everything we touch has some kind of a >> computer cycle! ! ! GREAT POINT!!! > > Even lighting... I've pulled (and reused!) 8-pin PIC microcontrollers > out of discarded emergency lighting. ...
Along those lines, as I was preparing for a class I taught this quarter called Computing in the Small, I came across some interesting stats. Microchip crossed the 12 billion PICs shipped a few years ago and were running at nearly a billion a year then. ARM holdings quotes over 50 billion ARMs shipped. They estimate that about 60% of the Earth's population has daily contact with a device containing an ARM. That's not too far behind the 64% who have running water. And not all that long ago the 8051 was the most fabbed ISA in the world. The bottom line is that computers involving humans interacting through keyboards, mice, and screens are really just a niche in the computing world. Embedded systems are the predominant class of computing systems. Or to twist a line from Shakespeare, There's more in the universe of computing than is dreamt of in the PC philosophy. BLS
