apple2freak@gmail.com wrote:
A question that has been forefront in my mind lately is whether or not the "spirit of Woz" has any place in the IT industry today. In other words, is there a place for simplicity, elegance and efficiency of designoutside of certain specialized embedded systems? The answer so far appears to be, "no," because as far as I am aware there is not a single piece of commercial computing hardware I'm aware of that embodies theseprinciples.
The "spirit of Woz" was borne as much out of necessity as any higher purpose. Chip count meant cost and on the bleeding edge, this meant big $$$. Sure, there was an elegance and art to it, but as you surmise, there's simply no need for that at this point in IT industry. Time - not logic gates - is money these days, so you'd be stupid to pay top $$$ to have top engineers spending weeks or months trying to squeeze a design into a part that's only $0.50 cheaper in volume - not to mention kill your time-to-market. No big mystery there.
I've done a design for a customer whose prototype had an FPGA almost twice the size of the projected requirement, with the idea of migrating to the smaller (footprint-compatible) part before production. Guess what - there was no significant commercial incentive to change it in the end... and so it stayed.
MJM would be horrified! ;) Regards, -- | Mark McDougall | "Electrical Engineers do it | <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug> | with less resistance!"