[ChuckMcM]

Yes. And in fact a 32 bit microprocessor with a meg of flash and 256K of RAM can run a number of useful OSes that have networking capability.

What I find interesting about the situation is the Arduino environment. The Teensy originated as an "Arduino" type dedicated controller board. The Arduino environment originated on something that had 32K of flash memory and 2K of RAM. (Think Altair 8800 or IMSAI 8080).

It was designed so that people new to embedded controllers could get something running quickly on a very simple processor.

The Cortex-M architecture (which the Teensy uses, as does the STM32 parts) is somewhere between the 68000 and the 80286 in terms of its capability (no MMU though).

On at $30 dev-board (STM32F429-DISCO) from ST-Micro I've run a full shell/loadable program environment with networking based on a FreeRTOS kernel and a shell of my own devising.

It is the Arduino environment that cripples these things, if they ran the equivalent of MS-DOS none of these complaints would make any sense at all. (and they are very capable of running that level of OS)