I don't know where you get that. We are never going "to
get rid of" special
purpose hardware.
Anyhow, I just re-read Stallman's proposal, and as
I've
said previously, I like it. This reading, I paid more
attention to the
discussion of properly defining a general-
purpose computer. That is a tough
one, because most
dedicated devices, such as you may find in a rubber making
machine, are built around a general purpose CPU.
Would the fact that
the only program loaded into the ROM
is dedicated to making rubber make that a
special purpose
machine? ie: the fact you cannot program it to do anything
else, from outside the black box.
However, you could reprogram it from the
inside, by
replacing the code in ROM, but you are still very limited to
what
you can do with it because the I/O through which the
program has an effect on
the real world will be specific to
the task of making rubber. You could
repurpose some of that,
to some extent, and make, say, a timer out of it or use
it
as some other industrial controller. May not be very
flexible, though.
Of
course you could just yank out the CPU and start over,
making a new machine out
of it, and thereby prove that at
least the CPU is a general purpose computer,
but then it is
no longer a rubber making machine.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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