26 Oct
2011
26 Oct
'11
9:20 a.m.
On 26 Oct 2011 at 11:05, David Riley wrote:
Just musing, anyway. I feel like going down this
taxonomy rabbit hole
is as much of a fool's errand as the "speed metal"/"thrash
metal"/etc.
arguments we'd have in high school.
Exactly. We're a long way from the time that "embedded" meant 68HC11
or 8051-style applications. I know that there's at least one vendor
that sticks a Linux system inside what amounts to a 100BaseT female
connector. Is it embedded? I'd say so.
The absence or presence of file systems is neither here nor there. I
wouldn't dispute that a $20 MP3 player, for example, is an embedded
application, but there's a file system in there for certain.
Operating system? Well, there are OSes that fit inside a low-end
PIC. For that matter, there's a version of Linux that runs on a
PIC32 ?C.
Rabbit-hole indeed. The boundaries are very indistinct.
Particularly when someone is talking about internet-connected home
refrigerators.
Technology has a tendency to obsolete terms of art. On my local
Craigslist, there's a seller who advertises a "minicomputer" for
sale. It's basically an mobile device with an external keyboard.
--Chuck