low-power-computing
Latest stories covering low-power-computing, with summaries and links to related coverage.
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I ran Photoshop on a £0.60 computer chip
opinion
8 min read
An Adafruit Fruit Jam board built around Raspberry Pi’s RP2350 chip emulated an old Apple Macintosh and ran early Macintosh versions of Adobe Photoshop and WordPerfect. The RP2350 chip costs about £0.60, although a usable computer also requires components including memory, storage, display output, and input hardware. The emulated system approximates a mid-1990s computer; the chip has two 150 MHz processors and can add 4 MB of RAM and gigabytes of storage. A Macintosh SE comparable to the emulated machine sold for £3,495 in 1989, or about £9,554 in current money using the Bank of England inflation calculator. The Fruit Jam includes Wi-Fi, infrared remote support, HDMI and keyboard terminal capabilities, and a ready-made Mac emulator, but its GPIO and USB design differs from several related RP2350 boards. Photoshop and WordPerfect required an emulator image with additional PSRAM. The author found WordPerfect’s uncluttered interface easier to concentrate with than a modern laptop environment. They suggest that low-power, understandable hardware could support less distracting devices for writing, web reading, messaging, maps, and music, while acknowledging that modern web pages, 4G and 5G networking, high-quality photography, and video present significant limitations. Possible software targets include FUZIX, BBC Micro emulators, Oberon, Smalltalk, Plan 9, and terminal software.