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Sometimes I wonder if playing with old obviously obsolete computers is a waste of time.

Been working on replacing the BIOS on a 386EX single board computer with a custom monitor / "hypervisor" I'm writing in Rust as kind of a demonstration of how low level you can get with Rust. I want to post a Show HN after cleaning it up a bit.

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Enjoying yourself is never a waste of time.

True, and you often learn something new while doing it.

To be honest, the main reason I went for something so old is that 1) I had them in my collection of random electronics and 2) the newest computer that full documentation for every component in the system is available for is not a new machine.

Current computers tend to be massive black boxes. I've learned so much about random hardware by reading Linux kernel drivers when the documentation is under NDA.

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