[Oberon] Active Cells

[eas lab]

Brainstorm:--
What attributes of a FPGA-design project making the Wirthian
approach profiable, are common to other potential projects?
What is the Wirthian approach?
Simplify, by factoring-out the essential items.
Why bother?
Because humans have evolved to have a 3,4,5:short-term-memory.
Apparently apes can count to 3, but birds only to 2.
If 3 people enter the bird-watch-hut and later 2 exit, the
observing-birds all think "they've ALL gone now; it's safe for us".
FPGA: Schematic diagrams are MASSIVELY superior to word explanations.
Consider the impossibility of replacing music notation by 'words'.
That music notation has been stable for centuries, suggests that it
has achieved the optimum, compared to inferior verbal exchange.
Consider the information transfer & processing rate of a fluent
sight-reading concert pianist!

Perhaps other project which need the combination of representing
knowledge in text and diagrams would be suitable?

What <computer-systems> have survived [like music notation] the
changing fads, possibly pointing to classical values?
Decades old DOS:Norton-Commander is still being polished in the
*same form* in the *nix version: `mc`.
What are the central attributes of mc?
Visual & menu-based. No need to remember if/where to put semi-colon.
Which are exactly the central attributes of ETHO.
Because these are the attributes which match human evolution.
If we were dogs, we'd have scent based systems.
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>  (a good web browser would also be needed)?
Ie. to comply [herd like] with the commercial manipulators.
You remeber:
 knowledge is embedded in text - not eye-candy;
 how we were able to get text from inet: eg. ftp;
 then M$ battle to kill competition/Netscape forced the herd to
   'use' a *proper* browser to read the bus-time-table embedded in
   300% extra eye-candy.
Then commercial interests killed efficiennt engineer-designed USEnet and
replaced it by a zillion private-web-sites designed by PR/art-students.
So no-body can/will use efficient public transport and each must have
his own car: for 9 billion to imitate the Californian lifestyle.
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Am I annoyed that M$ & google killed my efficient 1990s ETHO-based email?
Guess.