demonlapin writes:
"Brian Benchoff at Hackaday has an ambitious new project: a homebrew computer based not on a classic 8-bit processor like the Z80 or 6502, but on the 16-bit Motorola 68000. It's a backplane-based machine with wire-wrapped connections planned. His first summary post is here. Blinkenlights are planned."
[ED Note: With so much commercially available hardware getting more and more locked down, projects like this are a good reminder of what is possible for a dedicated enthusiast.]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @05:58AM
I remember meeting a complete idiot in college who seemed to be genuinely incapable of understanding that different microprocessors were incompatible because they used different instruction sets. Back then there were such things as x86 and 68000 and PowerPC and SPARC and UltraSPARC all in common use. Now almost everything uses AMD64. The idiot has finally won.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by regift_of_the_gods on Friday February 21 2014, @06:09AM
There's ARM. And as server-side computing is becoming mostly x86_64, I don't mind because it means that as I (slowly) learn to read the generated 64-bit instructions, I'm able to apply what I learned to different OS platforms. It's the trend towards JVM and other virtual machines that kinda bothers me. Now I've gotta learn this Node.js business and stuff like that, it's a totally different mindset from system programming. Java the language is not bad, but nobody - especially not employers - care about Java the language. They care about the hottest Java-based frameworks, APIs, and tools - or the same for Python, Ruby, or JS.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @06:23AM
Now that there's a 64-bit ARM, will we finally truly have one architecture to rule them all? Which will win the final battle, AArch64 or x86-64?
(Score: 1) by darinbob on Friday February 21 2014, @11:33PM
But the same CPU doesn't mean things are compatible. There are different application interfaces, like stack layouts and register usage conventions, plus different reliance on operating systems, different hardware memory layouts, an so forth. Even on the exact same machine we don't have compatibility.