> This is definitely not the fastest, but I think it may be the cheapest, slowest, simplest to hand assemble, lowest part count, and lowest-end Linux PC.<p>Amazing to think that 8 years later these ATMegas are <i>more</i> expensive than some of the SoCs currently on the market in production linux devices.<p><a href="https://hackaday.com/2018/09/17/a-1-linux-capable-hand-solderable-processor/" rel="nofollow">https://hackaday.com/2018/09/17/a-1-linux-capable-hand-solde...</a>
I'm sure the author had a ton of fun achieving this. I must admit to loving this kind of thing despite the lack of utility.<p>With respect to functional utility though, it's possibly worth pointing out to others that Linux had (has?) an option to compile for MMU-less hardware. This was the basis for uClinux [0]. Though it supported pre-emptive multi-tasking I'm not sure it ever supported 8-bit CPUs.<p>Then there was LUnix [1] - a unix port for the C64 (written about a decade after the C64 came out). MMU-less, pre-emptive multi-tasking and (somewhat) usable. Not Linux, but still pretty amazing. Someone had even written a Small-C compiler for it [2]. You can watch a demo of it here [3].<p>People are very clever :)<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9CClinux" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9CClinux</a><p>[1] <a href="http://lng.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://lng.sourceforge.net/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110106052323/http://www.reocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/4588/scc6502.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20110106052323/http://www.reocit...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLJXFFzERA8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLJXFFzERA8</a>
So today in theory according to <a href="https://elinux.org/STM32" rel="nofollow">https://elinux.org/STM32</a> you can buy an STM32F4 board which costs about 100RMB (USD$15) including external ethernet PHY and SD card and run Linux on it. It looks like STMicro is seeking a very competitive price point for STM32F407 class chips right now and you get USB OTG, camera, etc. as well as "more RAM than anyone will ever need". I would like to see that.
Seems two hours or thereabouts is the sort of 'standard time' for 8-bit micros to reach a bash prompt. That's been the case for about 10 years.<p>Nevertheless, that's still a fantastic achievement. And the ARM emulator makes it even more so.