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Re: On The Face



On Thu, 5 Feb 1998, Eli Marmor wrote:

> > the CNN site has pictures an Quicktime movies:
> > 
> > http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9802/04/belgium.gates.ap/
> 
> Thanks to Yaron, I read the computing news of CNN, and found out
> that Israel is on the headlines of all the American on-line news
> web-sites. No, don't turn on your radio. Kol-Israel is busy with
> junks (e.g. Yom-Limudim Aroch in the Beduiyan schools). The story
> is about National Semi-Conductors Israel (a.k.a. Tower). The
> company announced in Tel-Aviv, that they are developing a new all
> in one computer on a single chip. This chip will include the next
> generation of 686 (and this is the reason why they bought Cyrix),
> and many other features, such as MPEG, etc. It will have various
> DIRECT interfaces to many devices, including graphics, audio,
> video, DVD, etc. No more motherboards (although you may still want
> an expansion bus). The expected price will be under $100 (!), and

This sounds like a proprietary interface. How can Linux support a
proprietary interface, buried in silicon, and probably kept under wraps to
prevent the concurrence from following up with a clone too soon ?
Especially since the firmware sounds like it's going to be flash, inside
the chip (i.e. BIOS). Any plans for a publicly available programming
interface (maybe a subset of the real thing - to allow free software to
work on it) ? Developer's SDK's under $1000 ?

> they hope to sell about 600 million "computers" (600,000,000) at
> 2000 (more than the number of all the computers in the world!).
> 
> They claim that this price will insert the PC into the class of
> "set-top boxes", and they expect many implelmentation, such as in
> cars, etc. I think that we can contact them and offer an
> implementation of an embedded Linux, which can be used for NC, and
> many other purposes. IMHO, Linux is more suitable for this type of
> computer, than Windows.
> 
> BTW: The news tell that currently there are 200 employees, and the
> company hires 70 additional. If anybody of you seeks for a work,
> it worth checking.
> 
> -- 
> Eli Marmor