Re: A Challenge to all takers...

["josephoswaldgg@hotmail.com" <josephoswald@gmail.com>]

You are very vague when you say "capabilities approaching that of
modern PCs." Modern PC hardware is complicated.

To take just one example: video output for modern PCs is handled by
highly integrated, high performance GPUs and video hardware on a fast
bus. This hardware is highly specialized and proprietary, requiring
complicated drivers and OS code to provide a usable API for
applications programming.

You will not build this in your garage, or code it using a few
engineers working on it as a hobby.

Designing a new processor and bus is a possibly fun activity, but you
will not achieve real hardware meeting modern standards without a
company the size of, say, AMD. GHz IC design is not a hobby for
tinkerers, anymore than building a Cray I was within the reach of
hobbyists in the Apple IIgs era.

Would you muse on an automotive group about building a new kind of car,
presumably from scratch, with capabilities approaching a Honda Accord?

What you *can* do is something like developing an interesting FPGA core
with a novel CPU programming paradigm. It will have limited real-world
performance, but has wide scope for creative thinking, and can actually
be realized and used in demonstration projects. From a software point
of view, it is conceivable to write a new API/runtime environment to
allow new models of programming applications to run on a widely
supported OS infrastructure like Linux.

The whole thing that made Apple II's accessible to hobbyists is that is
was limited in its performance aspirations, but unlimited in its scope
for creative uses. One could understand virtually everything about an
OS that fit in 32k total ROM+RAM. You simply cannot understand as much
about a system that barely fits in 32 MB. (And don't imagine for a
second one could implement anything realistically "modern" in
capability in less: software "bloat" is not a moral failing, it is the
result of an engineering compromise, accepting lower resource
efficiency in return for hugely increased capability.) The Apple II
kind of limited performance+wide scope is now embodied in the PIC/FPGA
realm, not the PC realm.

The hobbyists who in 1900 would build an automobile are now building
kit cars or tinkering with modifications to existing cars, or restoring
old cars. This is because the modern auto industry has achieved such
amazing efficiencies of scale that they can beat any hobbyist in *both*
cost and performance. Modern PC hardware & software has achieved
roughly the same thing.

Good luck and have fun, but don't go tilting at those windmills.