modern serial terminal

Dave McGuire wrote: 1. Price. The hardware costs of a one-time development project can be more than using a readily available general purpose device. You can run down to any thrift store and buy everything you need for something like this for under $20. 2. Time. It takes less time to go out and buy the hardware than it takes to design, fab, debug, redesign, refab, redebug, ... 3. Ease of development. All the tools are already there: compilers, debuggers, profilers, etc. 4. Ease of Repair. If the hardware dies, worst case you just need another run to the local thrift store. With a specialized solution, you need to spend several hours repairing it, wait for several days for repair parts to be shipped to you, ... 5. Expandability. Using a PC means you can easily supply many different terminal emulators easily, many of them already written. With an FPGA, you probably need to develop them all by yourself. 6. Bugs. When your software is composed of EPROMS and FPGA's, fixing bugs requires more than just a recompile. You need a development system, a device programmer, toolkit to disassemble and reassemble the unit, etc. 7. Ease of duplicating. You discover you need 10 more of these for some customer. Instead of sending out for 10 PC boards, 10 sets of components (many probably obsolete), building them, burning assorted FPGA,s, EPROMS, etc., when you can just buy 10 cheap PC's and you're done. ... I don't understand why someone would want to spend 10x more tima and money on a one-purpose device, when they can get everything they want and more off a cheap PC.