Me being a caveman who believes that technology is a hammer that still can be used to drive nails into building materials instead of our own heads, I'm longing for an Intermesh of simple networked 8-bit machines running on vanilla (no ARM core bonuses) FPGAs, with CPUs simple enough to be predictable and understood not by a select few superhumans in the world, but by a critical mass of people, and communication protocols built from scratch with privacy and security in mind, so that such device could represent a social node: here's some info that I chose to make public, and there's my protected data. A single pedestrian FPGA could host a swarm of such tiny CPUs, each dedicated to a single task or security domain: a CPU to talk to shared filesystem, a CPU to talk to the private one, one more to process input, one to Tx/Rx bytes over the wire etc..
Or, if that is too complex, there could just be a bunch of breadboarded ICs capable of networking. There actually are real-world examples of such machines exposed via telnet, e.g. http://www.homebrewcpu.com
And all the performance beasts, while surely indispensable, could just enjoy their air-gapped solitude. Are there any massively parallel supercomputing tasks whose results couldn't be summarized and reduced to mere text, which is not too hard to move over the airgap manually?
