apple2freak{at}gmail.com wrote:

> A question that has been forefront in my mind lately is whether or not 
> the "spirit of Woz" has any place in the IT industry today.  In other 
> words, is there a place for simplicity, elegance and efficiency of design
> outside of certain specialized embedded systems?  The answer so far
> appears to be, "no," because as far as I am aware there is
not a single
> piece of commercial computing hardware I'm aware of that embodies these
> principles.  

The "spirit of Woz" was borne as much out of necessity as any higher 
purpose. Chip count meant cost and on the bleeding edge, this meant big $$$. 
Sure, there was an elegance and art to it, but as you surmise, there's 
simply no need for that at this point in IT industry. Time - not logic gates 
- is money these days, so you'd be stupid to pay top $$$ to have top 
engineers spending weeks or months trying to squeeze a design into a part 
that's only $0.50 cheaper in volume - not to mention kill your 
time-to-market. No big mystery there.

I've done a design for a customer whose prototype had an FPGA almost twice 
the size of the projected requirement, with the idea of migrating to the 
smaller (footprint-compatible) part before production. Guess what - there 
was no significant commercial incentive to change it in the end... and so it 
stayed.

MJM would be horrified! ;)

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"
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