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The same ones that were also found to be using pirated bios code as well...
By now I’d call it abandonware.
The sad thing is, they kindof gave up and officially added support for the things, although on the other hand, trying to sue anyone in China is probably impossible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don’t have to be. It’s just that people like the nostalgia aspect and it gives a de-facto standard with some degree of preexisting hardware to coalesce around. To have a complete grasp of the software stack, complexity has to be controlled, of course… so the typical offerings are 32 bit architectures with a few MB of memory and an SD card for storage, and if a “GPU” is included it’s usually just another MCU or cor…
There has to be a small Unix-like OS that could fit an RP2040 or ESP32. No MMU might be a deal-breaker for a more complete (and secure) OS, but we don’t need all that functionality in every form factor.
My question is: why we have to be stuck in nostalgia? Why isn’t there today a computer with modern processors and GPU which can boot to a REPL, where you can easily interface with all the HW, for example audio and video? I wanted to do something like that for the RP400. But is more difficult that it seems…
Modern hardware is too complex to understand and bootstrap for a single person even more so as a hobby project. These known unknowns can be a powerful motivation for someone who (partially) understands modern hardware to tinker with understandable systems. Some go down the retro route while others use medium to largish microcontrollers.
Pre-microcode and mostly pre-CISC instruction sets were readily mastered. The constraints of storage, distribution media, lack of any high-level system programming languages, the small number of programmers, etc... meant that there just never was not that much system code for any given architecture. Similarly, I/O devices were exteremely simple and limited in number. MMU hardware was still a rarity. All this meant that any reasonable system programmer mastered a machine entirely, its instruction set, all its I/O and all of its (system) software.
At the end of 1977 DEC shipped its VAX-11/780 and VMS V1. Less than a year later, I join DEC's compiler group to write VAX Pascal V2. I can only compare moving to VAX/VMS to being kicked out of the garden of Eden. Quickly I realized that never again would I enjoy that sense of mastery that I had felt on earlier machines :-(