On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 11:29 PM, Murray McCullough < c.murray.mccullo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was reading in a dated magazine article on the "freedom to build(a > PC)": Well you can't build phone; can't build a car; can't build a > refrigerator; can't build a TV. Do we have the freedom to build a > computer? We did in the earliest days of the PC- the 8-bit era. Heck, > that's all one could do! It was limited and is to this day. AMD vs > INTEL control what we can do. Has anything really changed? > I'd say that we still have the freedom to build a computer; in fact, it's probably easier than it ever was. True, it may not be feasible to build a high-performance computer based on current generation x86 chips, but there are so many alternatives: some of the 8-bit favourites are still being made (6502, z80); then there's the AVR, PIC, TI 430, the Propeller, various ARM chips. There are free or low-cost CAD packages, and having small series of PCBs made is almost ridiculously cheap. You can get logic analyzers for $150 or so, and if you want to experiment with FPGAs, you can get useful development systems for well below $100.
