On 01/13/2016 04:29 PM, Murray McCullough wrote:
I was reading in a dated magazine article on the "freedom to build(a
PC)": Well you can't build phone; can't build a car; can't build a
refrigerator; can't build a TV. Do we have the freedom to build a
computer? We did in the earliest days of the PC- the 8-bit era. Heck,
that's all one could do! It was limited and is to this day. AMD vs
INTEL control what we can do. Has anything really changed?
Hmmm, well. I can build a phone (not a cell phone, of
course, but a land-line phone is relatively simple.)
Some people have definitely built cars, and gotten them
licensed. I have built things that are essentially
refrigerators. We have one of those ice cream makers that
takes about a ton of ice cubes to make one quart of ice
cream. I hacked up some refrigeration components to chill
the brine, which gets re-used. Works great!
My insane friend Walter turned his Tek RM35 scope into a TV,
and watched TV on a 5" green screen while he was in
college. Hmm, Walter also cloned a Data General Nova with
piles of TTL chips. Probably very little by AMD or Intel in
there, either.
Jon
