Raspberry Pi - two things you've been waiting for without even knowing

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The first production batch of Raspberry Pi boards will be finished on 20th February. Yay!

It's been a long wait, but an understandable one. Anyone who has been involved with getting a product to market knows the pitfalls that delay, and delay, and delay again. With the Pi, the team have done an amazing job; we're getting all the functionality that was promised at an astounding price.

The other good news is that Broadcom have released a datasheet describing the peripherals available to the ARM chip used in the Pi. This will make to easier for us to use things like the timer; it also explains memory mapping and other topics which will be of interest to anyone who wants to work close to the metal of the Pi.

In particular, it looks as if the datasheet would be invaluable to anyone porting Forth to the Pi. I'm hoping that Frank Sergeant will port his Riscy Pigness Forth implementation to the Pi at some point; it would be both useful and instructive, and the intended school-age audience would get great value from it.

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