First Internet message and ...

On Wed, 27 Nov 2019 at 15:47, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: [1] You didn't say that, though. [2] If it sells enough units for someone to make a living off it, that is the _definition_ of "commercially viable". As such, my first link qualifies. See: https://rc2014.co.uk/history/ ? By May 2016 things were getting busy enough that I had to quit my full time network infrastructure engineer job to dedicate my time to RC2014? ? My last link, the CB2, it based on an ATmega644. The AVR series had sold 500 million units by 2003, and vendor Atmel was sold to Microchip Technology for US$3.6 billion, 3 years ago. Microchip make the PIC32 used in the MaxiMite which I also linked to. These devices sell, today, in the *billions* of units. Many have 8-bit architectures. Is that "commercially viable" enough for you? E.g. is outselling all Intel x86 products annually significant enough? Zilog still sells derivatives of the Z80 such as the Z180 and eZ80, today. Modern Z80s run at up to 50MHz. This is *not* a hobbyist business. It is a very large, profitable, commercial, mainstream market. The fact that hobbyists built little educational standalone computers around them is really neither here nor there. It's a rounding error. To think that because people build such stuff with them, or because the Z80 once powered the Micro-Professor MPF-I, is to say that DEC was a vendor of home and hobbyist toy computers because most of the machines running today are maintained by hobbyists. Well, I have _slightly_ more than that -- in fact I actually bought a new video game this year, for the first time in about 18 years -- but really very little. But you don't get kids interested in programming by telling them that they can implement VisiCalc. Most of us got interested in this stuff as kids, I suspect. I certainly did. If we don't get more kids interested, then the field will die. So I suggest that you are trying (and, incidentally, failing) to be too selective and judgemental and are failing to notice the forest we're all standing in because you've found a beetle on the bark of the nearest tree. -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053