Viewing profile — lproven

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204505

Back in the mid-1990s, my personal home file server was an IBM PS/2 Model 80, the highest end 80386DX IBM offered: 25MHz, and a tiny bit of L1 cache on the motherboard. I ran NT Se…

The deadly combination of people on the autistic spectrum tending to miss humour, especially subtle humour, even more so when it references things outside their narrow cultural win…

> haven't found much that explains how or why it's different Windows are directories in the filesystem. Their properties are files inside it. Modify the file, the window changes. T…

I didn't get an Amiga until a decade after their peak but yes, even I knew about guru meditations. :-) And bombs on the ST. Macs got a hardware button to drop into a debugger and y…

> require near daily reboots. This is true, but the thing is that was normal then . It was the stuff of jokes: "You know what the best thing about owning a Mac is? Something in you…

I knew this about Pike, but not Ritchie. Thanks. I think, though, that one of the vastly underestimated aspects of Plan 9/9front is its simplified C. AIUI one of the biggest differ…

Alpine Linux supports x86-32. It's the basis of Docker and has tens of millions of copies in production use.

https://lowendmac.com/2014/star-trek-apples-first-mac-os-on-...

> Much as I loved DR-DOS, it did have occasional compatibility hiccups. Because MS carefully built them. This was proved in court. The developers who built the incompatibilities si…

I don't want to just quibble for the fun of it but so much more of this is wrong than right that it's downright misleading. > I'm pretty sure CP/M 86 was already a thing. Yes it wa…

> It's unfortunate that the source for FlexOS is not available So very true. 100x this.

> by definition you have flat memory. No, not at all. It would be more accurate to say: "by definition you can have flat memory, if you want, but you don't have to." But everybody …

> pip just makes more sense than copy. PIP was a stock tool on DEC OS-8 and other OSes of which CP/M was basically a cheapo cut-down Intel version. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe…

Wow! Thank you for this. I had no idea -- except for the performance delta, which does not surprise me at all.

9front is the community fork of the OS that the creators of UNIX and C did next. This is what Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson did to fix the faults in the Unix design. Linux, FreeB…

Explanation of the codename, from the artist who did the "cover art" for an earlier version and who works on 9front: https://analognowhere.com/_/tcrxsm/

Oh, thank you! I could come back to the "modernising RISC OS" piece and update, as things are now actually happening. Although I was pessimistic for its prospects, it's becoming re…

RISC OS is a really interesting and significant OS, one whose importance is largely missed by American readers. GUI computers conquered the mass market in the mid-to-late 1980s; by…

> I guess technically that'd be Arthur rather than RISC OS. RISC OS was Arthur version 2.0: they renamed it with a more internationally-market-friendly name.

> Let's make a whole other finder that's completely different to the main one we use to navigate files. In my retrospective for the original Mac's 40th anniversary, I explained the…

Many. A decade & a half ago, I put the original project team lead in touch with the London user group, which resulted in this talk: https://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/P…

First OS with built-in scalable font rendering as standard. First OS with full-window dragging as standard (instead of an outline). First OS with a taskbar/dock as standard.

I think the assumption is that if you're interested in the source or contributing, you already know what it looks like. There are loads of galleries and walkthroughs out there. Her…

What about Minix 3? Probably the most widely deployed microkernel ever: it's inside every Intel CPU for the last ~20 years. Already has a mostly-working port of the NetBSD userland…