phys169@canterbury.ac.nz (11/05/90)
In article <PCG.90Oct30191923@teachk.cs.aber.ac.uk>, pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes: > As to other rumours, I read recently, again on Byte or on the net, that > the 88k has enough spare die to also be able to store some interesting > chunk of microprogram. This to me makes much less sense, but who knows? It's a pity this discussion is getting serious and side-tracked (well, side-tracked by itself isn't too bad). Just to brighten it up a bit, the idea of some spare die on chips like the 88K makes me wonder... If chip manufacturers were to ask for ideas as to what to plonk onto the spare space, what sort of suggestions would be popular? I guess there'd be the purely practical ones, like some fancy hardware debugger arrangements, or a 80286 emulator, and so on. Personally, I'd like to see a Z80 emulator, to beef up my ZX81, or a DG Nova 4 instruction set going on stolen cycles would be fun (so I can run all those games I made all thos years ago). What about a circuit to deliberately modulate the e-m interference generated by the computer during idle time to play music, or generate synthetic speech to explain faults with the computer - not just the "Parity error in block 12, corrected by ECC" type of stuff, but "Some idiot is stuck in a loop using a floating point loop counter and an equality test; consider zapping job 7012" and such like. People take computers too seriously, as I said. In particular, there seems to be a repetition of history coming up, something like the days of CPM (where lots of companies got on the bandwagon, so many that some had to get out - but that didn't mean the Z80 chip, for example, was doomed), or the extreme competition over home computers - where large companies lost megabucks competing for what turned out to be the sort of low-profit-per-item business that only Asian companies seem to be now interested in. The workstation wars, surely, are just like that? Who wants to sell the most (what will be) $1000 workstations with minimal profit and maximum "industry-compatibility" (both factors needed to suceed at the moment, and both are likely to make it possible for any backyard-or-whatever company with one or two good ideas to unseat them at any time). I think is the *real* problem facing computer companies now, is how to get their customers to keep buying more expensive computers when they don't have any need for more computer power. Hungry windows systems were one idea, but its about time for another. Quadraphonic computing, perhaps? Mark Aitchison. <signature line under construction>