Subj : Assembly written OS
To   : All
From : calcmandan
Date : Wed Apr 22 2020 11:19 pm

I was pointed to a modern OS that's completely written in assembly. I
downloaded the small ISO file, burned it on a live cd, and booted to it. So
far, despite its lack of driver support for my NIC, I'm impressed. Once it got
past the blue setting screen after BIOS, it took four seconds to go to desktop.
It was so fast, it blew me away.

I had posted this following thread on fidonet:cbm

Before saying anything, I want to point out that there is no pretense of
expertise in this subject. I'm just a curious bean. As the growth of retro
computing matures, projects to resurrect the platforms by building vice boxes
gets more common. The C64-mini, the zx spectrum, sega.. Otherwise, the 8-bit
guy is taking off-the-shelf components to build himself a modern juiced up
Vic20 to sell at some point beyond vaporware. They're creating the basic
interpreter and kernal for their system. All's well and good. This brought me
to an interesting thought with a similar notion. What stops anyone from doing
the same thing with a modern cpu and memory/bus system? Is it the complexity of
the modern cpu? In retro systems, the developer controlled memory allocation
such. I'd assume the difficult part would be to micromanage every bit of memory
management on a complex system. Am I on the right track? 

I only ask these questions just to get a better understanding of it all. My
daily laptop is a TRS-80 M200 laptop and, unlike any other system in the house,
it's instant-on. It's ready to dance a moment after depressing the power
button. 

It would be utterly BOSS if a modern system could be created in the same tact.
Could someone enlighten me?

The newsgroup picked up the thread and responses came in. As typical, the
question wasn't really answered. Instead I got advice on how to speed up a
modern system. I know how to do all that. When I power up a C64, it's not
instant but it's ready to go by the time the screen warms up. My model T, same
thing, about one second and I'm ready to tango.

So a followup message came up and someone pointed me to KolibriOS. I downloaded
it, burned it on a cd and booted live. It didn't have drivers for my nic so i
lacked network, and I hadn't done any tweaking to the mouse sensitivity, but it
was quite an experience. Loading from CD it took about three seconds to be on
the desktop.

So a modern OS written in assembly. Imagine how great it would be if a computer
was designed around that OS and built into a breadbin-like system. I'm going to
join their forum and get involved. The commandline is quite similar to linux
from what I see.

Has anyone heard of the system? Here's the url: https://www.kolibrios.org/en/

.... Visit me at: gopher://gcpp.world
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