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I suspect your Head of Maths was playing a trick.

The reason I think this is that the PC Emulator on the Archimedes emulated something broadly equivalent to a 186 with 640K RAM. Later versions supported EGA graphics. It was useable for fairly undemanding DOS-based applications but I don't think it could run an Excel macro because the first version of Excel to support macros was version 5 - that came out in 1993 and would have required Windows.

A reasonably cutting edge PC of the time would have been a slow Pentium or (more likely) a fast 486 with maybe 4MB RAM. I really don't think that would have been physically possible to emulate in software on any Archimedes.

However, what is possible is Aleph One produced a co-processor board for the Archimedes that had a 486 chip fitted. Plug that in, you'd fire up RISC OS, run a small program and abracadabra! You could run Windows quite happily. Were I a mildly mischievous head of Maths who'd just upgraded his moderately elderly Archimedes with such a card, I would be very tempted to bring it down and wipe the smile off that salesman's face.

YAFFS might be a better choice. It only works on NAND flash memory (but IIRC compact flash is NAND), but should be a bit faster (mounts writes etc) than JFFS2. However, if you're using compact flash (which includes hardware block mapping) you DO NOT want to use a specialized file system. The point of block mapping flash memory is to present the drive as a traditional hard disk, so traditional FS's can be used on it. If you use a specialized (or write heavy) FS on a block mapped chip you'll most likley end up doing more harm than good. Plus, YAFFS in particular requires specific hardware functions of flash chips (such as OOB write access) that are abstracted by the block mapping layer.

You probably want a filesystem tailored to Flash characteristics, such as YAFFS.

All the electronic engineering/firmware development people I talk to use gcc for developing at least some of their products. Some use Linux in their products. Some run Linux n their desktops. Most/all of the universities use OSS in their computer science and other programs.

NZ has actually produced quite a bit of OSS code that is in wide usage throughout the world including Koha (http://www.koha.org/), YAFFS (http://www.aleph1.co.uk/yaffs/), much of the KDevelop/gdb interface and many others. The Ozzies are no slouches either.

With a a proper and flash specific file system the write limit problem is almost non-existant. Wear leveling can allow the memory to last for years. One of the reasons for the semi-crappy performance/dependibility of these flash drives is because they use FAT over a flash translation layer, which uses more writes than nessesary and doesnt include wear leveling. A real flash filing system such as YAFFS is far more robust. The only problem is it requires support in the OS, which isn't included by default in any popular desktop operating system.

The recent--and constantly improving--development of write-leveling in the Flash firmware and the OS filesystem drivers has made this essentially a non-issue. By distributing repeated writes to different cells, modern Flash possesses a far greater resiliency than that of Flash produced before wear leveling was introduced. For more information, check out the this whitepaper.
I believe it quotes a lifetime of something like .55 days versus 49 years for repeated writes to same logical block or sector (remember, with wear leveling enabled, the physical cell you're writing to may be different each time).

For filesystem-level wear leveling (i.e., filesystems designed for flash memory), check out YAFFS and JFFS2.

For information about wear-leveling in general, see its Wikipedia entry.

- Roey

theres also yaffs which requires less memory and runs faster on NAND flash chips, which is the type of memory that would be used for that kind of storage. NOR is slower has larger pages, it's usually used as ROM chip.

show me a laptop as nice as the powerbook, and i'll switch.

until then, i'm totally smitten with the architecture and the good design. my powerbook is as open as i -a programmer- need it to be. while still giving me 'total media experience' in the same package, on the beach, with my girl .. my powerbook even killed my TV!

the beauty of the linux, and i believe, the darwin lesson too, now, is that nobody controls the OS, the hardware belongs to the owner, they should always be able to do whatever they want with it. how the system is -sold- however, is up to Apple. and you gotta admit, they do a good job of it.

most Apple users aren't being restricted from doing things with their systems .. the same is true, for now, of PC users .. and i think that any 'distributor' worth their salt should realize by now, that their rather significant investments in so-called inventory management may as well be being applied to things, perhaps .. really show Apple whats up.

JFFS is an unacceptable alternative. The two filesystems have wildly different goals. FAT is simple and can be implemented in a small amount of space.

If JFFS is unacceptable, what about YAFFS? Its GPLd, fairly widely used already (many SBCs including my FileZerver uses it), very stable, scales well, and has a direct interface (YDI) for RTOS and embedded systems.

All it needs is a set of native Win drivers so that thumbdrives formatted that way can be read in Windows.. and for it to be distributed in all forthcoming Win service packs.. *pinch* Ouch! Oh.. was I daydreaming again?

That's an Xscale (StrongARM) processor. Linux has already been ported to a few ARM machines. It probably wouldn't take to long to get the basics working. Then the bitch is getting things like the LCD and peripherals working. I don't know how much flash memory is in it, but if it can contain WinCE then it should be enough for a minimal Linux with an X server. Then it would actually be useful, at least for Unix/Linux types. And it wouldn't lock you out of your "desktop" machine while you're using this "display".

Hell, you could probably throw in the RDP, Citrix, VNC clients too, and an X11 window manager. That way you could have seperate windows from different machines and different protocols. Throw in rxvt and ssh, and you'll be able to connect to just about anything. Much better than this lock-in device that MS has come up with.

• Imagination is more important than knowledge.