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Comment by drewm1980 | Hacker News Reader

drewm1980·

The mill has been in development for... 18 ~years now! Soon they will be able to hire engineers who are actually younger than the company. I wonder if there has ever been a tech company that survived so long without bringing a product to market. Duke Nukem Forever took ~14 years.

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According to Ivan on their forums (so take this with a grain of salt as it's from the horses mouth rather than an external assessment) they were apparently supposed to be levelling-up in the summer of 2020.

They have at least secured a decent patent portfolio, particularly on the belt.

From what I understand, all the developers have day jobs or are independently wealthy and can afford to work on it without (much?) pay. They haven't accepted VC money, even though that would likely have sped up development considerably.

Their product is hardware patents.

That's patently wrong. :) I worked for the Mill for a while The Mill is as real as it gets. EDIT: No, there is no actual CPU but the software, the compiler, the simulator, etc. exist.

Where does their income come from? When is the CPU going to be released?

I haven't worked for them for a few years now but it's still a "sweat equity" organization as described on the web page under "About" at https://millcomputing.com/

They consider investments for their minimal costs as well.

I would be happy if they just released a instruction-level simulator to play around with.

It would also be super-nice if they released at least a Copper or Tin core (low-end) that can be synthesized to an FPGA for people to try out.

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