We don’t have to be. It’s just that people like the nostalgia aspect and it gives a de-facto standard with some degree of preexisting hardware to coalesce aroun

We don’t have to be. It’s just that people like the nostalgia aspect and it gives a de-facto standard with some degree of preexisting hardware to coalesce around. To have a complete grasp of the software stack, complexity has to be controlled, of course… so the typical offerings are 32 bit architectures with a few MB of memory and an SD card for storage, and if a “GPU” is included it’s usually just another MCU or core acting as the graphics processor. There are a lot of good cyberdeck options built around the ESP32 and RP2040, for example. While some of these are used primarily as emulators, others run arbitrary code or projects like meshtastic. I would love to see, though, a simple OS that actually provides a shell and multitasking ability that is designed to run on these platforms, idk if anything like that exists. It would be super cool to have a python REPL, a text editor, file browser, gopher client, MUD client, things like that running with alt-t to switch context or something like that.