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ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

exdos.eu.pn

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Re: ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

#23

Post by byuu »

I'm very happy to see people are still doing this sort of thing!

I've always wanted to see something of a truly 'barebones' OS; but one that could at least get you 64-bit mode, OpenGL ES, audio output, USB polling and network connectivity with libc available. Yet not be as complex and large as Linux/BSD.

Being able to run a real-time application with no pre-emption, no virtual memory protections, no kernel transitions, etc could probably eke out an additional ~20-30% of performance on a CPU-bound application. Plus the near-instant boot would be great for media players, emulator arcade boxes, etc.

Probably just not possible, due to the driver situation. There was a bit of hope UEFI could lead to better drivers for hardware prior to boot, but efforts around things like GOP (graphics output protocol) haven't really gone anywhere that I've seen.

Sadly, there's a very small amount of modern things you can do with 32-bit mode, VESA and a keyboard. I've never even found a video card with a 1920x1080 VESA display mode; they're almost exclusively still 4:3 only.

Plus, no sound rules out gaming and media; no internet (let alone Wifi) rules out any connectivity; no strong filesystem rules out moving data around easily; no USB rules out loading things from external storage, gamepads, etc.

Only strong use case would be for embedded; but ARM platforms have this area beat substantially in cost, power, tooling, etc.

Re: ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

#24

Post by chetanahuja »

Regarding learning assembly, I'm beginning to come to the view that it's in fact the best way to teach the first course in programming to kids. They don't come with any preconceived notions of what programming should look like and given an explicit, visual model of the computer, they quickly learn the small number of operations to write programs. More over, once they learn to do

   LDA A
   ADD TWO
   STA A

   DAT TWO 2
in C or a higher level language makes soooo much more sense. That awkward phase of internalizing that '=' is an assignment operator and is different from another operator meant to test equality gets a lot shorter for a beginner.

Btw, this is the best online CPU simulator I've found for that use http://peterhigginson.co.uk/LMC/ I'm shocked at how all the code academies and hour of code's haven't created a polished version of LMC (Little Man Computer... look it up).

Re: ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

#25

Post by ivanca »

meddlepal wrote: post #4
lmitchell wrote: post #2

I've lurked on the OSDev forums he credits on his website for a long time, and both Omar and Muazzam (mentioned as well on the website) are goddamn impressive for barely-teenagers. Someone hire those kids!

Eh, let them enjoy their early formative teenage years without the stress of a job. There's a time and place for working but barely 14 isn't it.

You are genius! So lets better suck the life out of you with an office job with stressfull deadlines and mindless meetings.

Re: ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

#27

Post by trsohmers »

This is anecdotal, but when I was his age and getting into the "real" tech world (and getting my work recognized), I really disliked my age being made a big deal. A big influence on my own view (and I think many others in this community) of being a "hacker" was Steven Levy's "Hacker Ethic", which specifically said:

"Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not criteria such as degrees, age, race, sex, or position"

While it is great that we recognize good work like this, bringing up his age in the title is focusing on a pretty irrelevant metric when we should focus on good work, no mater who makes it.

Re: ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

#30

Post by elliotec »

trsohmers wrote: post #27

This is anecdotal, but when I was his age and getting into the "real" tech world (and getting my work recognized), I really disliked my age being made a big deal. A big influence on my own view (and I think many others in this community) of being a "hacker" was Steven Levy's "Hacker Ethic", which specifically said: "Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not criteria such as degrees, age, race, sex, or position"…

Sure, but it's impressive nonetheless. A 14 year old kid is building an operating system. What was I doing at 14? I was not building operating systems, thats for sure.
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