On Mon, 5 Oct 1998, Roland Orre wrote: > If this is true about Compaq it is really serious and bad for the > society. Of course it is very easy for software developers if there > is only one hardware, only one OS etc, but to keep the evolution > going we need manifoldness and I would not have believed that Compaq > would be in that urgent need for that quick and dirty money. Ok we > still have some other forks on the chip family tree, like the powerpc > but for how long? Intel bought the StrongARM arm of DEC before Compaq bought the rest a few months later. Compaq now have the Alpha, Intel the StrongARM. They are slightly limited as to what they can do with it as Advanced Risc Machines (part owned by Acorn) still own the rights to the architecture and only licensed it to DEC. Nevertheless, I think Intel intend to put quite a bit of effort into developing the StrongARM range for PDAs and suchlike- until they bought the SA they hadn't had a decent embeddable processor for years. > In the long run it would maybe be nice if there could develop a kind > of free chip, a hardware equivalence to the GNU/Linux OS, but that is > probably still far away in the future.. Or..., any ideas ? It's already being done. I can't remember the URL, try searching on Slashdot for the story which announced it. They seemed to have some pretty radical ideas for the architecture, but it takes a lot of money to develop something like that, and I can't see many venture capitalists seeing the benefit of Open quite that much yet. --------------- Linux- the choice of a GNU generation. -------------- : Alex Holden (M1CJD)- Caver, Programmer, Land Rover nut, Radio Ham : -------------------- http://www.linuxhacker.org/ -------------------- -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.ml.org
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