51–60 of 174 posts
I appreciate the topic, interest, and ambition, but if a human couldn’t be bothered to create and document it, I can’t be bothered to spend my time reading about it.
> The graphical operating system that could have been for the IBM XT Visi On[1] was a graphical operating system for the IBM PC that actually existed as a commercial product, though definitely not a very successful one. It was made by VisiCorp, the same company that created VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet for a personal computer). It was demoed at COMDEX in 1982, before the Apple Lisa was released. It came out after…
This kinda almost makes it sound like VisiOn introduced Gates to the GUI which is not true. They were already using and developing for Macintosh machines at Microsoft and had hired Charles Simonyi from PARC with his expertise in GUI systems before Comdex 1982. The story seems to be more that seeing VisiOn gave MS the nudge to get into action on the GUI due to a sense of competition/urgenbcy from VisiOn rather than le…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ive been throwing z80, 6502, 68000, 8086, i386 and x86_64 asm at it lately. Haven't seen it get stuck on any of them.
Do you think the low-level nature of ASM contribute to how successful the LLMs are with it?
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.
Yes? It's still possible to make it safe if you ensure that all programs are written in a memory safe language. Aside from throwing out a ton of existing code it's not as bad as it sounds. The Birth and Death of JavaScript touches on it towards the end.
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
I don't know why it seems reluctant to disclose AI use, because this is one of the best advertisements of Claude I've seen, and I say this as someone who has been sitting on the fence on the subject and saw a lot of slop in the past few years. If I was working in Anthropic's marketing department, this is the sort of thing I'd point to as a demo of its abilities. That said, it's not like something of this nature was t…
Claude AI just created something in a few hours, perhaps, that teams of intelligent developers at the time struggled to do in years of effort.
The graphical operating system that could have been for the IBM XT. A MacOS-like desktop for the Intel 8086, written entirely in real-mode assembly (with Claude). Verified to run on real hardware, with FAT12/16 support, ported apps, games, Sound Blaster support and upcoming Hard Drive support.
Well there was GeoWorks (which AOL used the GUI of to their advantage): https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos
This looked great, I started reading things, and then I just kept reading and reading the voluminous description details, and it was an immediate indication to me that the whole thing was built up by Claude. Confirmed in the repo. I closed the tab. I appreciate the topic, interest, and ambition, but if a human couldn’t be bothered to create and document it, I can’t be bothered to spend my time reading about it.
> The graphical operating system that could have been for the IBM XT Visi On[1] was a graphical operating system for the IBM PC that actually existed as a commercial product, though definitely not a very successful one. It was made by VisiCorp, the same company that created VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet for a personal computer). It was demoed at COMDEX in 1982, before the Apple Lisa was released. It came out after…
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.
> Hand-written real-mode 8086. No C, no linker, no runtime library. More like hand-prompted...
Claude's Opus and Fable have done a really great job helping me and another contributor shape this operating system. It's been a really interesting way to learn about the different techniques that other operating systems have used to get the performance we saw in LisaOS, MacOS, Windows, GEOS, etc... performance at 640x480 on an XT class machine is tricky! Also, the 64KB segment limitations were very interesting to overcome!