Comment by justanother | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justanother | Hacker News Reader

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That rabbit hole goes pretty deep.

In the early 1990s, the IIgs community went through this sort of "faux workstation" phase where we had 16MHz hotrodded accelerator cards, high(er) resolution graphics cards like SecondSight, and a pre-emptive multitasking operating system (GNO/ME) along with the beginnings of TCP/IP support (gstcp). If you squinted one eye, we could almost hold our own against something like SPARCStation 1 as long as you didn't want to run Mosaic. You could fire up a desktop with a few shell windows and compile C programs and telnet out while playing SoundSmith (not-quite-.MOD) songs. That is to say, we were pushing the whole mess beyond anything a sane person would even fever-dream of attempting.

The community today is putting out more releases more steadily than any other era I can recall since then, but we seem to have mostly backed off of the whole "workstation" application that was in a few dorm rooms at the time.

Edit: FWIW I just noticed the date today. Happy 8/16!

I remember being at a TUG conference (I think Texas A&M/1990) and speculating about whether it might be possible to get a working TeX implementation working on the //e. It would require hand-rewriting the whole thing in 6502 assembly and some insane use of bank-switching, but I think it could have been possible. But I had neither the time nor the hardware to do it which is, in the end, probably a good thing.

GNO/ME was published on GitHub years ago:

https://github.com/GnoConsortium/gno

https://github.com/GnoConsortium/gno-docs

I tried to look it up, but are any bootable GNO/ME disk images around? I'd like to see it run in an emulator just out of curiosity.

No idea if these work, but I found disk images here:

https://macgui.com/downloads/?cat_id=193

Install instructions:

https://a2central.com/features/gno/

Also a short video of it running:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPi9EW4Mnk4

This appears to be the magic search term:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gno+2.0.6

The gno_206.zip file here is also apparently a complete install:

https://public.asimov.net/images/gs/os/gsos/gno/

Reference for gno_206.zip:

https://comp.sys.apple2.narkive.com/7qima2le/gno-2-06-partia...

This seems to have been a pattern with all the 80s home platforms, especially in Europe.

I came from the Commodore Amiga, and used mine still in the early 00's all hacked up with cottage industry expansions and software hacks as a Mini-workstation writing LaTeX and C/C++ for Uni and a somewhat functional browser.

The Atari ST had a similar trajectory post Atari with FreeMiNT, and even smaller the Archimedes and Sinclair QL did!

> even smaller the Archimedes

I have written about the ST continuation efforts:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/05/new_atari_display_dri...

And the modern QL OSes:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/16/ql_legacy_at_40/

There is modern new QL-compatible hardware on sale today, which still amazes me, 4 decades later.

But saying that... If one were so inclined, which I am, one could argue that the entirety of the Arm platform, including the modern Mac I'm typing this on, is an extension and development of the Acorn Archimedes.

It doesn't run the Acorn OS, but neither do modern x86 PCs. And anyway, the original OS is alive and well and runs on modern hardware:

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

It doesn't use the original GPU, but nor do PCs. It doesn't use the same RAM layout or anything, but nor do PCs.

But it's a compatible, extended, modernised version of the self-same CPU architecture, just like PCs are. It can emulate the old environment so you can run the old OS, just like PCs can.

Any current Arm64 device, phone or tablet or laptop or server, is every bit as much an Acorn Archimedes as a modern multicore x86-64 computer is an IBM PC.

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