I got home, signed on, and looked at the mail box. Quite a response!

Don't get me wrong, guys. I have (and had) little intention of doing this
myself. Didn't realize just how good that mindset was until reading the
replies, though! Heck, I have to be careful just so I can go out on Friday's
with friends, much less buy a processor to mess around with, much much less
start buying chipsets and manufacturing boards. I figured someone out there
would have done something like this though, whether buying chipsets or makign
their own (I have no idea what's involved in the process, but I get the idea
it's...intensive). Someone with a ton of time, plenty of money, little life,
and lots of patience. Looks like you need to amplify all those requirements a
fair amount... There's a site from Stanford U that shows a 486-SX based
computer they built that's the size of a matchbox. Appropriately named the
matchbox PC and, likewise, their matchbox webserver each running either Win9x
or Red Hat 5.2 Linux. I thought if they could come up with this, maybe it had
been taken a step or two further at some point. If you want to see the 486
system, go to http://wearables.stanford.edu/

It was said you'd have to buy chipsets costing up in the thousands, and part
of the thread got into the actual physical considerations to account for in
lengths of traces, etc. I realize the limits you start to push when dealing
with today's gigahertz machines. The hardware to support these processors is
no doubt some pretty high performance stuff.

Probably starting another arm of the thread, what about yesterday's
performance processors? Somewhere in between the 486 matchboxPC and, say,
dual P4's? For the sake of argument, a Pentium 133 or 233, whose support
hardware, while maybe complex compared to the Pic's we're used to, is
possibly worth very little to anyone but hobbyists nowadays. With SX uC's up
to 100Mhz now (I think that's right. correct me if it's not), we probably
have a good idea of what to do with speeds really getting away from the
20Mhz/5Mips systems that we use. Okay, I guess I can see the difference
between 8-bit uC's and 32-bit PC procs. Just trying to dig the hole deeper
here! Even so, the idea intrigues me, even if I don't have the
time/money/skill to do it.

It was just a passing thought. Michael said exactly what I was thinking, with
the reward being a piece of hardware that you can take pride in and what is
apparently a great deal of knowledge learnt. That would be worth a great deal
to me, though I doubt I could actually follow through and come up with
something like this myself.

And BTW, as always thanks for everyone replying. Always lots of enlightening
responses.

-Tony

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