Mark McDougall wrote:
> 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! ;)

Not really--I understand business realities pretty well.  (I used to
try to show my managers how every week lost delivering a product
was a week forever lost from the peak of the product's profit
curve.)

I just prefer to *play* with computing as an art form, not a business.
;-)

-michael

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