Likely, sure. You're relying on a ton of work by other people - thousands of them just to get a modern processor, let alone Linux. Wouldn't it be cooler to und

Likely, sure. You're relying on a ton of work by other people - thousands of them just to get a modern processor, let alone Linux. Wouldn't it be cooler to understand the architecture, upgrade it and put it on an FPGA? Have a faithful Lisp machine with faster everything that fit in a $50 FPGA? No Intel backdoors. No adtech. No telemetry. No X11 cruft. No SystemD boot mess. No Nvidia driver that doesn't play well with others. You could own the whole architecture - it's small enough for a few people to really grok. Like restarting all of computing - with a lisp machine, for fun. Not relying on the million years of effort in Linux and the million years of effort on the modern processor below it. You'd be relying on the fundamental advancements at the silicon layer - modern ASIC cells are practically perfect, compared to what was available in the 1970's. No need for multi-phase clocks, multi-power supply systems (you don't need +/- 10V?). No 10A just to drive 128kB of SRAM. It simplifies everything! Architecturally a lot of the design in something from this vintage is "because they had to". Modern FPGA design is almost like having 'perfect' or textbook components. You can fan-out hundreds and hundreds of nets and meet timing at 100MHz - something designers would have killed for in 1980! With "proper" design, on a modern FPGA fabric, you could run at 500MHz. You'd have the world's most roided-out lisp machine. Boot time? Practically instant. Key lag? What lag? Need extra horsepower for a scientific calculation? Attach an accelerator directly to the bus. You could use Yosys and Verilator and the whole chain would be open. Nobody could ever take it from the community. At outdated silicon nodes, you can build an ASIC. You could put the whole design on Skywater PDK and publish your transistor level design. Would it be competitive with a 5nm processor? Absolutely not. Would it be the ultimate expression of the Hacker rebellion? I think so.