On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 11:33:50AM -0700, Chuck McManis wrote:
[...]
Of course the challenge then is of course
documentation. Early 90's was the
'great darkening' where suddenly everything became 'not consumer
friendly'.
Computer companies stopped publishing hardware descriptions, appliance
manuals stopped including schematics, cases because locked together and more
"appliance" like. A sad time we have not recovered from.
Schematics are not terribly useful, since electronic gizmos are often little
more than a SOC glued to a few passive components, so there's not much that can
be repaired. I stopped buying electronics magazines in the early 2000s because
the projects all just used a microcontroller and did all the clever stuff in
software.
I suppose we could make this stuff more repairable, but that means it's not so
heavily integrated. A 2kg MacBook fits rather better in my backpack when I'm
biking to work than an Osborne 1 would...
At a higher level, I note that Intel publish *excellent* hardware documentation
for free. There's certainly enough to design and implement an operating system
from scratch on an x86 PC. Just ask Theo de Raadt and
Linus Torvalds if you
don't believe me :)