Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

Old PCs may have their advantages, but I'd like to see a setup that had
features this wouldn't necessarily provide. For one thing - just the pure
"bare board" nature of embedded computing might not be well illustrated by a
PC, considering they already have prefabricated solutions to typical
embedded problems like "How do I actually get code loaded into this board &
cycling?" For another thing, they don't commonly have things like EEPROM,
A/D converters & discretes on-board. (You'd like to give students a machine
that is not what they are typically used to and pose the question "Well, how
are you going to solve Problem X when you don't have a disk drive and a
video monitor available???") You might also want a development kit that
reflected as much as possible current state-of-the-art hardware. If one were
to go to all the trouble of pulling the pieces together, it might be nice if
there were commercial spinoffs as well. :-)

If you look around a little, you'll notice there are available SBC's with
development kits that are priced in the small-handful-of hundreds-of dollars
($200..$500?) I don't think the hardware cost (until you get into
peripherials!) needs to be so high as to send someone off looking for old PC
boards at the junk yard. The problem is that they typically are available
only with a C compiler environment. It would be nice to have a similar setup
with an Ada compiler & some other related stuff that would make it useful
for education and possibly "real world" usage........

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"DuckE" <nospam_steved94@home.com> wrote in message
news:Yjhq6.539700$U46.16061033@news1.sttls1.wa.home.com...
>
> I envision old PC's as an ideal target for students wanting to play around
> with embedded work since 486's are, at least in my area, cheap and easy to
> come by since nobody wants them any more.
>