> > It's too bad that no one told microchip this when they had the
> > "hair-brained" idea to build a microprocessor with adc's, uart's, spi
> > interfaces, flash rom, eeprom, ram and only charge 2.00 for one.
>
> What are the units of 2.00 here?
> Euros, Pounds, Punts NT$ (please yes).
> And which MChip beauty is so cheap?

Purely rhetorical.  Just trying to make a point, not trying to be literal.
US$

>
> > After all the world was going to
> > need only three mainframe computers to meet all of its data processing
> needs
> > (according to another self proclaimed expert).
>
> It was IBM !!!
> (And I think it was  few more than 3, but not many).

It was three.

<RANT>

Sorry James if I came off too offensive, but I'm kinda tired of posts that
are demeaning without offering an explanation based on solid reasoning.  I
spend allot of time trying to carefully read every post.  And when you have
two jobs its hard to keep up with all the activity.  So please everyone, If
someone has and idea or wants to tackle a project that might be considered a
waste of time, let's not slap them down, just because.  Many of the best
inventions started out as "stupid, useless, pointless wastes of time".

Taking Linux for example, it was an immense waste of time to develop an
entire operating system that no-one would use.  Now there are millions of
people running a Unix operating system in their homes.  Microcontrollers
themselves are sort of self contradiction.  I mean using a computer to run a
thermostat?!?  Fifteen years ago, someone would have said "That's
ridiculous".  The difference between what is ridiculous and what is not is
TIME!

I used to work for a software company that wanted to develop a new product
(a production job scheduler) and I offered the "ridiculous" idea of building
it to run on a PC and then just build the hooks into the individual OS's and
communicate to the central PC.  That way the scheduler would only have to be
developed once, and you could have cross-platform scheduling.  Well,
naturally, the 'powers that be' thought this was a "ridiculous" idea.  I
mean, who would pay 40-50K for a piece of software that ran on a PC?  I
suggested also that it be developed to run under Linux, since we could
supply the PC and the OS for free to the customer.  This was 6 or 7 years
ago and at the time Linux was a novelty.  But, since a project of this
magnitude takes  years to develop, you need to try to have the foresight to
predict what the market is going to be 'down the road'.  Naturally, they
didn't do it that way, but the competition did.  Now the software company is
virtually bankrupt because everyone seems to need a job scheduler that runs
centrally and can schedule across different platforms.  I'm not trying to
"blow my horn" but make the point, that what may seem "ridiculous" now may
be the norm tomorrow.

</RANT>

michael brown
flames welcome but we should probably do it off list unless James doesn't
mind

--
http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us!
email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body