henry@ginger.sri.com (Henry Pasternack) (01/19/90)
Is it my imagination, or have Intel and the PC clones entirely taken over the computer market? I got it into my head the other day that I wanted to build an "embedded-system" game-playing machine. Plunking down six bucks for a copy of Byte and Dr. Dobbs, I found nary an advertisement for useful hardware or software, except for some very expensive commercial cross-compilers which run under MS-DOS. The whole world seems to have gone PC-compatible. Byte doesn't even have the Circuit Cellar any more. It's only been a couple of years since I was last interested in this kind of stuff. What is going on? Is there any kind of organized support for computer hobbyists? Are there any inexpensive operating systems for non-PC machines available? Yuck. I'm pretty discouraged. Advice is solicited. -Henry