Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> 1500 milliwatts is still several orders of magnitude more power than I think a personal computer needs, and 16MiB is obviously a couple of orders of magnitude more RAM.

So, your idea is a computer with less than 200 kiB of RAM? So, devices like a PC AT 286 or Amiga A2000, with their whole 1 MiB RAM, are hopelessly overpowered, and the right kind of a machine is something like a Sinclair Spectrum?



An adequate kind, not "the right kind". Flash is a lot faster than electromechanical disks, so you can get by with less RAM.


Fair! These guys run Quake on an Arduino Nano [1], with only 274 kiB of RAM. But they have to jump through a lot of hoops.

Running e.g. Emacs the same way is likely unrealistic, and I find Emacs a great example of software that the user can actually inspect and personalize. I would like most user-facing software tools be like that. (In an ideal world I'd love my personal machine to have a terabyte of Optane memory, but currently such hardware is but a fantasy.)

[1]: https://community.silabs.com/s/share/a5UVm000000Vi1ZMAS/quak...


I think Quake is enormously more difficult to get running than an Emacs. That's why it came 20 years later historically.

I agree about inspection and personalization.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: