Low-power software for low-power people

We have been working towards portable terminals that interact with the user via speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition, and handwriting recognition. Our work includes the development of hardware platforms, operating system (OS) and application software; and the adaptation of signal processing algorithms to these systems. Although we will describe HoBo3, the hardware platform for this work, our primary interest will be in discussing software issues that are relevant to low-power portable computing. We compare a modern Unix implementation with the OS we use, "Plan9 from Bell Labs", and draw from this comparison a number of lessons relevant for the design of low-power software.