Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

There's an effort to port uxn to DuskOS (https://duskos.org/). The goal here isn't to be maximally performant or memory efficient (though at this point, running uxn on DuskOS on certain architecture is faster than the mainline uxn implementation).

Rather, these are computing platforms to maximize usefulness in the event of a societal collapse.

That is why there is a handbook of uxn opscode made to include hand gestures (https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/uxntal_opcodes.html), so that computing and transmission of computing can continue even with the loss of the computing hardware or documentation.



Dusks OS badly needs a ZMachine interpreter. The number of software running on DuskOS would skyrocket. From a Tetris implementation to tons of libre IF (and games) such as SpiritWrak, All Thing Devours, Reversi, ...

https://jxself.org/git/


I don't get it.. DuskOS mentions "it runs plenty fast on an old Pentium 75 MHz with 16mb of RAM." - that's a lot! I'd expect something geared for "civilization collapse" to be compatible with smaller embedded micros, like 80 KB RAM of esp8266 and 500 KB of RAM of ESP32.

I remember programming on 286 and 386 machines with 33 Mhz and 2-4 MB of RAM, and it was perfectly usable with Pascal and even C (although C was annoyingly slow, a few seconds per build). If your idea of old machine is Pentium with a _whole megabyte_ of RAM, or even more (gasp!), you don't need to pay Forth penalty, you can have normal languages with good ergonomics.


The smaller embedded micros are the target of CollapseOS, which is folded into DuskOS. The stage DuskOS is targeting is when we stop being able to have the ability to make new computers and new chips, and we start looking to salvage old ones laying around. There is also recovering knowledge from disks.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: