Not really looking for anything specific here, though some project is always just over the horizon with me. Seeing things like the RP2350 PC emulator and some retrocomputing videos got me wondering about intentionally low-end bare-iron devices that evoke the 8-bit computing era without emulation or FPGAs (both of which are cool and obviously the easiest way to recreate software and hardware, respectively) but also without being obligated to literally re-create an old machine with new old stock chips.
The easy solution is a Single Board Computer running Linux without a windowing system, but that’s not really in the spirit of what I’m getting at. Like, what machines or projects do you know of that boot straight to a text based interface, or even a BASIC or Python prompt as the “OS”, have some sort of removable storage, some sort of video and audio out, and support a keyboard, but are aggressively not a modern commercially viable architecture for PCs? Bonus points if it does have some enthusiast community.
All that said, I’m intrigued by this whole category, so I’d love to hear about your favorite retro-inflected projects even if they don’t exactly match my poorly defined parameters (some FPGA stuff boggles my English-major mind). Some I’ve run across include:
- Microbeast, though it seems to lack “proper” video out without an add on.
- CODY
- Olimex RP2040-pc, though it seems only to run emulators and demo code
- Geoff Graham’s Maximite and Picomite may be the purest expression of what I’m talking about. Fair warning: he does have some interesting ideas about open source (TL;DR he got burned not trademarking a name and blamed the GPL, though not exactly open source generally. Current software uses his own source available license)
Yeah, Force Majeure’s other name is an “act of god” clause. Something like the Cuban Revolution or other truly significant regulatory upheaval might qualify, a human-made force majeure event in the same way that a war is human-made, but this is going to be a huge stretch, verging on bad faith. Oracle just doing Oracle things, I suppose.
As I understand it, New Mexico is basically just saying, “make sure you account for water and electricity use.” The developer’s lawyers are going to have a very doable task to show that pushback on unfettered datacenter expansion was a foreseeable business risk. I think this is mostly a cynical tactic to renegotiate early in case the RPOs from OpenAI don’t materialize.
I’ve soured a bit on Ed Zitron as he’s clearly making a brand out of how confidently he’s asserting that the bubble will pop any day now, but I do think he’s zeroed in on some of the bizarre developments in the business world that will eventually result in said pop. Ed’s fun for venting, but Cory Doctorow seems to have a slightly more measured take. It certainly vibes with my doomer sentiments, but also doesn’t feel like the preaching is the product.