Introduction

Abstract

These are exciting times for hobby computing! In the 1980s you had to round up chips for the central processing unit (CPU), erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM), and random access memory (RAM); find some peripherals; and then wire up the numerous address and data bus lines. After all that, you still had a pretty limited 8-bit system with no operating system. Today, you can acquire a 64-bit ARM quad-core system on a chip (SoC) with 1GB of memory and several built-in peripherals already assembled! Not only that, but the system will run a Unix operating system, whether it be Linux or some flavor of BSD, complete with a compiler and a plethora of other software tools. All of this fits in the space of a credit card footprint.