Alan B. Pearce wrote:
> > I wonder how small you can make a DOS (freeDos-running)
> > 386-class computer these days?
> 
> I was just thinking how much of a DOS equivalent could be put in a large 
> PIC24 ... 

You could take a Propeller chip, run an x86 emulator on one (or more)
cores, do video and keyboard interfaces on other cores. An external
1MB SRAM chip could provide working storage, and an external 256MB
flash chip could represent a hard drive. It would probably be about
as powerful as the original PC/XT, limited primarily by the available
bandwidth to the external SRAM.

It's absolutely astounding how much technology has shrunk. One case in
point: I have an Apollo Computer DN10000 in my office, which was built
around 1990. It is about the size of a dorm refrigerator and was a
very advanced graphics-oriented RISC-based engineering workstation
in its day. I recently (~30 years later) got a "Beagle Board", which
has a TI OMAP3530 processor and its companion memory chip (128MB SDRAM,
256MB flash). The processor has a 600 MHz ARM core, plus a separate DSP
core and a hardware graphics acceleration core. The two chips fit into
a space 12x12x2 mm, yet the combination outperforms the DN10000 in
pretty much any useful dimension -- by orders of magnitude in some
cases.

-- Dave Tweed
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