[rescue] Sick Dreamcast hacker

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 12:12:15PM -0400, Brian Hechinger wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 12:07:51PM -0400, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> > 
> > There's an idea for a company.  Build a lisp machine out of a FPGA,
> > then package and sell it as an engineers/scientific/whatever TI killer
> > calculator. 
> 
> i would buy that in a heartbeat.
> 
> portable LISP machine in a calculator format.  uhm.  hell yeah.

A lisp machine out of a FPGA would probably be my second project.  The
first being some tutorial piece.

I see so many nifty FPGA templates floating about, I'm surprised that
this hasn't already been done by someone.

The biggest question I have would be should we ditch the key pad
altogether and go for a pen driven system, with the required research
of how to enter formulas more naturally then one currently does on a
palm pilot, or key the keyboard and make people jump through hoops for
non-numeric entry.  Or, we could perhaps have a rudimentry keypad, and
a quikwrite pad
(http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/demos/quikwriting-prc.html). 

I think there is still a lot more work that can be done
w.r.t. realtime math processing, and colaborative work.  I'm sure
there is more work to be done in the set things up and let them cruch
category, but I'm more interested in the interactive stuff.

Actually, I'm having some new thoughts on how to arrange such a device
for best usability.  

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd