[openppc] Meaning of "OpenPPC"

[Tom Geller <tom@tgeller.com>]

"M&M's" <mms.kisskool@free.fr> writes:

>As I am reading what you wrote, some questions arise. G3 and G4 would then
>be absolutely impossible to route on a PCB by hand ? What is then the
>meaning of OpenPPC ? Nothing more than a dream ?

I can answer that.

Ralph Giles and I started the OpenPPC Project a little over two years 
ago to try to build motherboards based on a freely available 
reference design then being created by IBM. See 
<http://www.openppc.org/news.html> for a history.

Unfortunately, IBM never delivered the Gerber (layout) files 
necessary to actually produce the boards. They apparently tried 
creating a few of their own, discovered that the northbridge they'd 
commissioned from Winbond was faulty, and decided that it would be 
irresponsible to encourage others to suffer problems from that faulty 
part. So it never got past the schematic stage.

<http://www.openppc.org> has a lot of information gathered during 
that shining year or so that it looked like it might happen, though. 
Some of the mailing list archives have been lost, but what's 
available is at <http://www.openppc.org/archives/>.

Cheers,

-- 

       Tom Geller  *  San Francisco * tom@tgeller.com
     Executive Director, SpamCon Foundation (spamcon.org)
   Other domains: tgeller.com, bandwidthpr.com, openppc.org
SpamCon Foundation Member #1: Verify at http://www.spamcon.org
--
To unsubscribe from openppc mailing list please visit http://www.opencores.org/mailinglists.shtml