RE: free hardware platforms

Elijah L. Wright (elw@wc.tntech.edu)
Thu, 18 Sep 1997 02:06:39 -0500 (CDT)

>> Forget it. We already had several groups trying to create free
>>hardware platforms. Few of them ever produced something usefull.
>Probably the only non 8bit was the NS32016 based box with free schematics
>etc. Nowdays its even less feasible. You need a good million dollars
>plus to lay out build, case, approval pass and ship a system.
>
>Alan

Speak you of the pc-532 machines? National Semiconductor 32532, as I
remember.. =) NetBSD and Minix run on those, i think... but I think
there were less than 250 of the boards ever made, and probably waaay less
than that were ever soldered together and running. They are neat,
though... look at www.netbsd.org/Ports/pc532/index.html for a summary of the
platform, if you're interested.

Some guy at MIT or someplace like that up north was designing Alpha-based
workstations. I'm pretty sure it was MIT, and pretty sure that the guy's
name was Smith. First initial J? dunno.

later,
--elijah