Comment by baud9600
1 month ago
This is great -
It’s almost as impressive as the “GOS” written for Atari 8-bit running on 6502 at 1.79 MHz. Visually it’s almost identical but has a nicer font. The specs are somewhat similar with 16 task slots, calculator app and task manager, serial mouse support (ST mouse) and Atari’s hardware sprites helping with some of the graphics. The XOR window frame is the same idea. Amazingly, Atari GOS runs in 128K of RAM! One has to admire the work and inventiveness in these projects. See description and videos here:
"Author" of os8088 here. I love seeing what these early limited system could do! Someone shared a video of GOS with me after seeing what os8088 looked like.
I believe os8088 also boots now with just 128k of RAM, but it's very limited in the type of apps you can load. There's a os8088.com/hardware page where one of the contributors to the project that has been helping optimize the operating system tested it out on a bunch of different machines.
It would be interesting to install os8088 on a later series, like a Pentium III 500mhz or a modern Intel i7! Would it even run? I guess os8088 could not harness the CPU power to make it usable. Instead, could a modern CPU run multiple instances of os8088 like a server? That’s probably something Claude could code…? A multi-session server that provides 1024 instances of os8088 by remote connection?
The XOR window frame was on most X11 window managers since late 80's and early 90's.