At 10:04 AM 11/28/95 -0500, Mike Fletcher <fletch@ain.bls.com> wrote:

For those who don't know, the PSX is a CD based gaming console released (in the US) in Sept by Sony. It's a MIPS R3000/25MHz processor with some SGI-designed polygon chips, 2x CD-ROM, 1M RAM, 2M video RAM.

There are a number of reasonably powerful game machines under $300, though that uses TV-screen video, which isn't enough for decent text; doing a $500 machine with a real monitor should be quite possible. However, to make it functionally useful, it needs at least a connector for a a disk drive - couch potato web-surfers can skip it, but anybody who wants to do real work will spend the $100-300 to add a disk, and probably add a CD-ROM as well. Without a disk, you can't do off-line reading, which significantly affects anyone using pay-by-the-hour network access services. (I used to use a diskless Sun with 40 MB RAM on an Ethernet, and it was usually fine, but I was motivated by not wanting a fan on my computer...) ObCrypto - you _can_ do decent crypto on a diskless machine as long as you've got some non-volatile storage for keys; a few KB should do, and the main applications would have to run in ROM.

The line between toy and real machine is getting more and more fuzzy (we use a box here at work with the same processor to compile for an AT&T telephony switch (which tells you how sad the AT&T product is :) :))).

Telephone switches don't need high-power CPU-crunchers, and the R3000 was quite a decent processor. They need clean, stable CPUs and appropriately-designed operating systems which are good at controlling lots of polled I/O devices - it's a PDP-11 job, rather than a Cray job. Generally the OSs have been hand-rolled, though it's becoming much more practical to use Unix to develop user-interface applications now that processors are fast enough to have short interrupt times. The previous switches used Intel processors - 386s let you do more than 8086s, pulling applications into the CPU instead of low-level logic.

How long until the NSA tries a Chinese Lottery attack hidden inside a Nintendo cart?

You've read "The Hacker and the Ants", haven't you? :-) #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0663 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281