The Sequential Prophet X is another modern synth with a full-blown x86 PC running inside it. You can see the mainboard in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8QDCocnt0M
Really awesome work! A simple OS for retro x86 hardware is a really cool project! I wish I still had some era-appropriate hardware I could test-drive it on.
When the author says 'I tend to run older hardware', how old do they mean? I'm typing this message right now on my Thinkpad x220 from 2011, which is unfortunately too old to run Zed because its internal Intel HD graphics card doesn't support Vulkan. I'd be an everyday user if not for this.
One of the coolest projects I've seen in a while! Amazing work! In case anyone missed the write-up^1, it's very well-written. I really enjoyed the chapter about designing the instruction set.
A lot of effort goes into accurately emulating historic processors in the MAME project, as well as other vintage hardware. It's generally accurate enough that MAME is regularly used to emulate vintage hardware when reverse-engineering devices.
Very cool! Would you believe I was actually just listening to some of the old Ultima game soundtracks when I saw this?
I wonder if they considered writing their disassembly in the 'pre-C++98 dialect of C++' used in the original, and targeting the original compiler. I've done some disassembly of binaries which ran on vintage systems, and I would've targeted the original toolchain if I could have. It's an interesting philosophical question.
Thinking about what would be going through Bill Kerman's little head as he approaches the rocket having just seen poor Jebediah Kerman vaporised on the launch pad was pretty funny. I don't think this same gallows humour extends to kittens.
To me it seems more sensible to store information relevant only to this OS in a specific cache somewhere within that OS. It would even make cache-like functionality such as evicting old entries super easy.
There are some tradeoffs. Like if you used a usb and set up folder colours or any of the other things stored in the file, they would not move along with the usb when used on another computer.
If I set a folder colour in Finder on my work MacBook, and then plug that USB drive into my personal computer which uses Thunar as a file browser on Debian, nothing would happen.
And? If you mount a Unix file system on another system, you may see ‘invisible’ fuels whose name starts with a period, may even see weird files named “.” or “..”, may not see ACLs, and may not see any file attributes such as user and group information.
In 1970 it already was not true that one could treat all filesystems the way Unix did, but it certainly isn’t true anymore today.
In case anyone doesn't know, Oxyrhynchus is a major source of archaeological discoveries. Particularly ancient (Ptolemaic/Roman Egypt) papyrus fragments recovered from an ancient landfill on the outskirts of the city. Notably some of the earliest-known Christian textual artefacts were found there (the actual earliest fragments came from elsewhere in Egypt). It turns out that Egypt's hot and dry climate provides the perfect environment for their long-term preservation.
Is this true? Paper (and I assume papyrus) expands and contracts with varying humidity even below the saturation point, and this motion embrittles and cracks it, no? So consistent humidity is key, and "consistently dry" is much more achievable than "consistently at an arbitrary other point."
Your intuition is more correct: it is not true. The relative humidity of the air matters below 100% as well. I think the parent commenter mistakenly assumed that only "condensation" matters, but materials will absorb moisture from the air even if the water doesn't condense. Entropy drives the dispersion of moisture, and some materials are "hygroscopic", meaning they don't merely reach equilibrium with the air, but actually concentrate moisture from the air and get significantly more wet than the air which feeds it water.
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