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Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

os8088.com

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Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

#111

Post by jhbadger »

lelanthran wrote: post #99
jggonz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of the AI written os8088 OS here... Thanks for sharing the promotional video for Visi On. It's cool to see how many different companies gave this a shot back in the 80s.

> Author of the AI written os8088 OS here... I'm curious about your goal in purchasing this project. You don't get any peer recognition. You don't gain any special skill. You can't copyright it. You can't sell it. You can't use it for anything useful. You can't use it as a learning exercise. It can't really be built on. It can't serve as a tutorial for others to learn. You don't get the satisfaction of a job well don…

When people write things like this I wonder if they just haven't used AI coding agents. You don't simply write a prompt and walk away and have a complete program written when you get back. You still have to put a fair amount of effort in description often many times, not unlike the sort of work you'd have to put in if you were supervising a group of junior developers as a systems analyst. It's still work, just at a higher level. And until (and if ever) we get AGI humans will still have to do this.

Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

#112

Post by garganzol »

throw10920 wrote: post #45
LeoPanthera wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside in the real world? Sure. Here on HN? I don't believe that.

OK, if you're so confident, surely you've gathered data that empirically shows that "virtually everyone on HN is using AI to write code and simultaneously dismisses all interesting new software as written by AI", because that's a very easy claim to prove or disprove. Can we see your results and methodology?

I know a guy who founded an AI-based startup well before ChatGPT, and recently I saw some of his public messages where he stands as an ultimate anti-AI proponent.

Meanwhile, his startup that received multi-million dollar funding and developed proprietary specialized LLMs, continues to exist being somewhat profitable.

Universal AI, however, poses an existential risk to his company. So he turns into a typical gaslighter: he tries to convince everyone that AI is a dead-end, not worth it, a total disaster. By doing so, he hopes to prolong the stream of existing profits maybe just for one extra day, but internally he already knowns that his company is toast.

Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

#113

Post by raphlinus »

garganzol wrote: post #106

LLM writes a better ASM then a C compiler? From running the demo in the browser, it seems so performance-wise and size-wise, but the ultimate test should be performed on a real hardware that I have no direct access to. Anyone can validate the performance on a real PC of the era? If it's confirmed, LLMs may be one of the ways of creating highly optimizing compilers in the future.

I was curious about this and had a look. The code doesn't look much better than what a good C compiler might produce, and I found quite a few opportunities to optimize. It doesn't look much at all like the 8088 code I wrote when I was a teen. Among other things, so much pushing and popping.

Take the irow loop in vga12.inc[1] (of course I'm going to look at the graphics code). Each iteration does push di; rep stosb; pop di; add di, ROW_BYTES (and some other stuff). Why not save the push/pop and add (ROW_BYTES - count), which could be stored in a register (dx is free here)? Just the push+pop is 15+12 cycles.

[1]: https://github.com/jggonz/os8088/blob/1f2fae44180fadaf85368c...

Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

#114

Post by alexdbird »

lelanthran wrote: post #101
userbinator wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that hasn't been done before, and now exists. Yes someone could spend immense amounts of time and effort, but clearly no one bothered to until AI made it easier. yet the complainers will always complain because they don't have anything better to do with their own time... "bugger off!" as they say.

None of what you say answers any of my questions. It's hard to be impressed when someone purchases a new toaster, even if it's a bespoke toaster. I want to know what the author thinks he got out of this.

And yet people have been impressed by my bespoke toaster

Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

#115

Post by lelanthran »

jhbadger wrote: post #111
lelanthran wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Author of the AI written os8088 OS here... I'm curious about your goal in purchasing this project. You don't get any peer recognition. You don't gain any special skill. You can't copyright it. You can't sell it. You can't use it for anything useful. You can't use it as a learning exercise. It can't really be built on. It can't serve as a tutorial for others to learn. You don't get the satisfaction of a job well don…

When people write things like this I wonder if they just haven't used AI coding agents. You don't simply write a prompt and walk away and have a complete program written when you get back. You still have to put a fair amount of effort in description often many times, not unlike the sort of work you'd have to put in if you were supervising a group of junior developers as a systems analyst. It's still work, just at a h…

> You still have to put a fair amount of effort in description often many times,

It's nowhere near "a fair amount of work". It's a fraction of a percent, if that. The reason I know this is because I am using LLMs quite deeply.

For this specific project, I'd be very surprised if the prompter needed to know anything more than:

1. Assembly exists. 2. The 8088 (and later) existed. 3. The target hardware's OSes did not support preemptive processes.

For Fable (which is what they used), it can infer the rest, with the user providing "No, that's not it, change the color" type of prompts.

Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

#116

Post by conradev »

lelanthran wrote: post #99
jggonz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of the AI written os8088 OS here... Thanks for sharing the promotional video for Visi On. It's cool to see how many different companies gave this a shot back in the 80s.

> Author of the AI written os8088 OS here... I'm curious about your goal in purchasing this project. You don't get any peer recognition. You don't gain any special skill. You can't copyright it. You can't sell it. You can't use it for anything useful. You can't use it as a learning exercise. It can't really be built on. It can't serve as a tutorial for others to learn. You don't get the satisfaction of a job well don…

I went to Amazon the other day and ordered a fully custom piece of software. I chatted with the seller about exactly what I wanted, what areas to focus on, and they ended up teaching me a thing or two about the domain. Very similar emotional experience to using a language model, which I’ve totally done before.

Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

#117

Post by garganzol »

raphlinus wrote: post #113
garganzol wrote: post #106

LLM writes a better ASM then a C compiler? From running the demo in the browser, it seems so performance-wise and size-wise, but the ultimate test should be performed on a real hardware that I have no direct access to. Anyone can validate the performance on a real PC of the era? If it's confirmed, LLMs may be one of the ways of creating highly optimizing compilers in the future.

I was curious about this and had a look. The code doesn't look much better than what a good C compiler might produce, and I found quite a few opportunities to optimize. It doesn't look much at all like the 8088 code I wrote when I was a teen. Among other things, so much pushing and popping. Take the irow loop in vga12.inc[1] (of course I'm going to look at the graphics code). Each iteration does push di; rep stosb; p…

True, that piece can be optimized better, but quality of the assembly code in general is not far away from what I had been writing in 1993-96. Back then, push/pops in function prologues/epilogues were a sign of experienced assembly programmer who avoided register clobbering by using standard calling conventions.

Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

#118

Post by StilesCrisis »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #49

https://os8088.com/how-it-works/multitasking/ > Pre-emptive multitasking on an 8086 > Twelve task slots, 1,536 bytes of stack each, and a timer interrupt that takes the CPU away from whatever is running 18.2065 times a second. No task is asked to cooperate and no task can refuse. If you don't have protected mode, can't any program just rewrite the interrupt handler? It's not a bad system, but it sounds easy to break.

This would be exactly like the original Mac--all processes had full heap access at all times. There was a special debugger extension that watched address zero because writing through to null was so common. (IIRC the original Mac intentionally left address zero alone for these reasons as well.)

Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

#120

Post by StilesCrisis »

tgv wrote: post #73
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #49

https://os8088.com/how-it-works/multitasking/ > Pre-emptive multitasking on an 8086 > Twelve task slots, 1,536 bytes of stack each, and a timer interrupt that takes the CPU away from whatever is running 18.2065 times a second. No task is asked to cooperate and no task can refuse. If you don't have protected mode, can't any program just rewrite the interrupt handler? It's not a bad system, but it sounds easy to break.

The original MacOS lacked memory protection too. It had cooperative multi-tasking, starting at version 7. Before that, the only thing that could be launched next to the main application were "desk accessories", which were a bit of a pain to write, as they had to stay out of harm's way.

MultiFinder existed before System 7. It was just optional.
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