Linked by Nicholas Blachford on Tue 13th Jul 2004 21:56 UTC
After personal computers arrived in the 1970's they went through a series of revolutionary changes delivered by a series of different platforms. It's been over a decade since we've seen anything truly revolutionary, will we see a revolution again? I believe we could not only see revolution again, we could build it today.
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You completely omitted lisp machines from your history, probably because you never used one (I haven't either), but I would argue that they're just as revolutionary, if not more so than many of the other consumer oriented pieces you mentioned.
And that said, I think the industry has proven, time and time again that worst-wins or cheapest-wins, either way. Hardware is a hugely expensive proposition to design and develop, far more so than software. I have a friend who designs DRAM among other things, assuming you have a design which is six layers, each layer let's just say is $10,000, and the whole wafer is thus $60,000. Now, if you have a bug in your hardware design, you need to replace that layer. If this happens at the last layer, you're out $10,000 to replace the one wafer (in a product line before mass-producing, they'll role out a wafer for each layer, just for this sort of debugging). But, if you're bug happens to be in the first layer, BAM $60,000 mistake. Can you, or any other hobbiest afford to spend that much on a bug in your design?
Not saying that hardware can't be messed with, but at a mass-production level, things get fugly. Anyway, point being - the winning situation is to use commodity hardware, best of breed perhaps (e.g. AMD64's and some sort of GPU that you can use to offload things onto, or heck even something tiny like a C3 that has wicked AES implementations), and go from there. Maybe later if you find success hardware will help support you (e.g. linux driver support is creeping in official channels now) but that's probably the last thing to happen.
That said, you can start at lower levels than you might think. Overhauling the BIOS could yield some real improvements, look at LinuxBIOS, or various OpenFirmware products. Heck, even www.soekris.com has implemented his own BIOS which offers serial console support and boots more OS's than LinuxBIOS does.
Hardware is a space that is extremely difficult to get into on a small scale, and if you do - then yeah, stick with fpga's and home designed PCB's and the like, forget about multi-core multi-threaded CPU's or 256bit GPU's or anything pushing the edge (even GPU's aren't anywhere near the same fab processes as cpu's are now). Leave the cutting edge to those who can throw billions at fabs.