Anachro-PC – The Anachronistic Personal Computer | Hacker News Reader

Anachro-PC – The Anachronistic Personal Computer

jamesmunns.com

55 pointsMindGods12 comments

I think there's definitely a market for some kind of "forever PC". A 20 year old PC is powerful enough to do a lot of stuff, and the really impressive part is that it wouldn't ever need to change significantly. Maybe something like the pico-8 "fantasy console" but for anachronistic "personal computing". Build some minimal apps that aren't user-friendly by today's standards but are nice and simple to program against and have good and simple UI paradigms.

I find it interesting that commercial viability is "anti-goal" as opposed to a "non-goal." I can absolutely understand why practicality isn't the primary purpose, but why actively avoid it? (Unless I'm just misinterpreting the terminology.)

Just a turn of phrase. I suppose non-goal is more accurate, but as my day job is building embedded systems in Rust, sometimes it's good to strongly remind myself to keep hobby and work time separate.

For anyone wondering about the CIPO /COPI thing instead of MOSI/MISO:

https://www.oshwa.org/a-resolution-to-redefine-spi-signal-na...

Conceptually, throwing a bunch of ICs, glue-logic, and some RAM etc. on a PCB is dead easy. The stumbling block here is the PC compatible BIOS. Is there an open source BIOS available that supports all the standard PC BIOS calls ?

Seabios on coreboot?

Qemu bios?

PCB design at anything close to modern switching speeds is anything but easy.

> somewhere in the neighborhood of performance of an old 286/386 DOS style PC.

The result of the project on that blog will be something that looks very, very different from the PC compatible! The only thing it will share is the "personal computer" name.

You probably could build an ISA bus IBM compatible PC out of microcontrollers, and port one of the open source BIOSes to it, but the utility of such a thing is questionable.

Have you SEEN the price of working 8088/80286 boards on eBay?! :D

Anything that gets people building more homebrew computers is a good thing in my book.

Hey, author here! I definitely think the communication protocol is the special sauce here :).

I am to focus on this in a couple different ways, largely based on either a pub/sub style format for smaller periodic messages, or on a mailbox style format for larger messages (display frames, etc).

I'm still pretty early in the brainstorming process, and this is intended as a hobby/teaching project, but I'd love to have things be useful for everyone using it, and having compatibility APIs are a big way of achieving that.

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