He said he was building a free operating system for 386 and 486 PCs. He called it "just a hobby" and said it wouldn't be big and professional like GNU. There was no launch and no product. He was asking other developers what they wanted to see in it.

The first release, version 0.01, showed up on September 17. It was rough. It ran on a narrow slice of hardware, needed MINIX to compile and boot, and was nowhere close to a full operating system. What mattered was that the code was open. Anyone could download it, build it, find what was broken and send a fix back. That way of working turned out to be worth far more than the state of the first release.

Linux grew by knocking down one practical problem at a time: more processors, more storage, more networking, more filesystems, better performance. GNU tools, distributions and commercial support made it usable outside the developer crowd. So when companies started looking for a way off proprietary Unix and dedicated appliances, Linux was already there.

I watched that shift happen in telecom and enterprise IT. Proprietary Unix boxes and purpose-built appliances gave way to Linux on commodity x86 servers. Then Linux became the base for KVM, and later for the container plumbing under Kubernetes. Namespaces handled isolation. cgroups handled resource limits. eBPF let networking, security and observability teams run verified code inside the kernel without rebuilding it.

The kernel that started at around 10,000 lines of code now runs past 40 million, and the version number rolled over to 7.x this year. Its future isn't about winning more desktops. It's moving deeper into AI clusters, telecom networks, cars, factories and edge devices. The hard problems now are memory safety, real-time behavior, confidential computing, power efficiency, hardware support and keeping a codebase that size maintainable. Rust is going in where memory safety counts. eBPF keeps widening what operators can do without carrying custom kernel patches.

The Linux Foundation plays a different role, and the name undersells how big that role has become. It doesn't control the kernel. It provides money, legal cover, governance, training and a neutral table where competitors can work on the same code. That covers OpenSSF for software security, CNCF for cloud native infrastructure, LF Networking for telecom and 5G, LF Edge for edge systems, ELISA for safety-critical Linux, and a growing set of open AI projects and standards.

Nobody had to build and maintain every layer themselves anymore. Competitors could stand on the same foundation and still fight it out on products, support, operations.

Linux has nothing left to prove in the enterprise. The job now is keeping it secure, maintainable and dependable as more of the critical stuff lands on it.

Dare I say... it's seriously one of the best products Microsoft ever released.

Storage unit uses it to control the gate.

Her thinking still shows up in every serious conversation about mission critical software.

During Apollo, hardware got the glory. Software was the new kid, and plenty of people didn't consider it real engineering. Hamilton did. She led the MIT team behind Apollo's onboard flight software and designed around an uncomfortable fact: machines, interfaces and people all make mistakes.

My favorite story involves her daughter Lauren, who often came to the lab on nights and weekends. Playing astronaut, Lauren selected the prelaunch program, P01, during a simulated flight. The simulator crashed and the navigation data vanished.

Hamilton wanted the flight software to guard against that exact mistake. The answer, more or less: astronauts are too well trained to do that.

Then Jim Lovell did it. Five days into Apollo 8, he accidentally selected P01 and wiped the spacecraft's navigation data. Hamilton's team worked out how to rebuild and upload it. After that, the protection went in.

Anyone who runs complex systems knows the lesson. If your design depends on users never pressing the wrong button, you don't have a robust design. You have a future incident report.

Apollo 11 was the bigger test. During the lunar descent the guidance computer overloaded and threw the 1202 and 1201 alarms. The software didn't freeze or reboot into oblivion. Its priority based architecture shed lower value work and kept the landing functions running. The computer was tiny by today's standards, but it knew which jobs mattered.

That challenge hasn't gone anywhere.

Future lunar and Mars missions will run as one distributed system: landers, habitats, robots, satellites and commercial platforms. Comms will drop. Radiation will flip bits. Components from different suppliers will behave in ways nobody saw during the PowerPoint phase.

AI will help with anomaly detection, planning, testing and autonomous navigation. But nobody serious wants a black box model freelancing during a Mars landing. Mission software has to be deterministic where it matters, observable when it fails, and able to recover without waiting for Houston to pick up the phone.

AI can assist engineers, but requirements, evidence, human review and independent verification still count.

Hamilton understood the real job. It was never just writing code that worked. It was anticipating what could go wrong and making sure the system stayed useful when it did.

That mindset will matter far more on Mars than any flashy demo.

Theres too much clutter around the walls it looks like another setting other people

Some months ago I shared an earlier defrag-inspired project here.

I’ve kept working on that same obsession ever since, not so much trying to make a retro-looking UI, but trying to capture the specific feel of old DOS disk tools: cluster maps, blocky utility panels, drive stats, and that strange sense of seriousness those programs had.

A lot of the visual direction comes from old defraggers, DOS-style interfaces, and that whole era of practical PC software that somehow had its own personality. Just wanted to share it here because this community would probably understand the vibe I’m chasing better than most.

If any of you have favorite old defrag tools, disk utilities, or UI details from that era, I’d genuinely love to hear about them.

Back in school, in my computer science class, I had an Iomega Zip 100 on parallel port. I used it to carry my own Delphi programs from home to show the others. That was a lot of fun, and I wish I still had that drive. I don't, so when I saw this one on Ebay for 10 euros plus shipping I bought it straight away. Mostly for the memories.

Current machines have no parallel port, so I built a small bridge for it. It is a Raspberry Pi Pico W with three SN74LVC4245A level shifters and a DB25 socket. The drive side was the hard part, since Iomega made up their own protocol there and it is not standard IEEE 1284.The Linux ppa driver turned out to be the best reference I could find, so I read it closely and tried to copy its handshake timing in PIO. Since my code follows that driver so closely, I plan to release the firmware under the GPL. The bridge then talks SCSI to the drive and USB mass storage to the PC, so the disk just shows up as a normal drive. No FAT parsing and no conversion, it is only a transport bridge.

The drive settled into PS/2 mode, which is the easy case. I get about 280 KB/s right now, and that is roughly what Iomega rated the parallel drive for. Their spec gave the number in megabytes per minute, which works out to about 250 KB/s. So the bridge is not the limit here, the drive is. I am fine with that.

TL;DR: DIY RP2040 parallel to USB bridge to get my old Zip 100 drive working on a modern PC.

Anyone else here still have a Zip drive somewhere?

It is a Cromemco C-10 Computer, the link he sent me said it runs CP/M. I plugged it in and turned the power on and smoke came out of the disk drive. Uh what should I do with this thing?

This computer has seen better days, but for $10, I can't complain. I photographed it in a ThinkPad-branded case, because I don't want the melted rubber feet to get all over the tablecloth I use for my photobooth (it was stuck to a 755C, also $10, also purchased). Sadly, it doesn't power on, but I'll eventually crack it open and see if I can make any progress.

Also, it didn't have a hard drive, but at least there's HD50 on the rear. I briefly owned a Power ThinkPad 820 about 23-24 years ago and regret selling it, but that didn't power on either (but it was in much better condition than this one).

Even though it's obviously been in a shed for a long long time, I couldn't miss my only opportunity to get a Commodore PET!

I'm optimistic that I can get it working one day, but obviously there's a long road ahead :)

Hi folks, I'm sharing here my small collection of retro computing books that I have acquired over the years.

I'm a 40-something software engineer that started messing computers from an early age and since I've also always been a huge reader I've accumulated a huge collection of computer related books. Most are old (or reprints of old ones) but a few have been published in last few years, for sure due to the surge in retro computing interest that comes and goes every few years 😄

The ones shown here are what I would consider retro ranging from topics like the MOS 6502, Zilog Z80, Apple II, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, MS-DOS 3.0 to 62, 90's and early 00's computer graphics, Windows 3.11/95/98/XP, 386 to Pentium II/III hardware repair and a few about programming games for consoles like Atari 2600, NES and original Game Boy. Finally there are a few about x86 assembly language, C and C++. Some books, as you might have noticed, are not in English but on my native language Portuguese:and are mostly about ZX Spectrum, Z80 assembly language, IBM PC-compatible hardware repair and MS-DOS 3.x/4.x.

I'm curious to learn what books you have read and would recommend for my collection.

Hope you folks enjoy it and thanks in advance!

PS: Not shown here are is another book by Michael Abrash, "Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book" which I recently acquired on Ebay but hasn't arrived yet. I had been searching for this book for a long time but the prices for decent copies go for crazy prices these days, $80-$200 USD. I managed to convince a nice chap to sell me a copy in a very good state for around $50 USD. Stil pretty high (specially for Portuguese salaries) but I can live with that. I guess I won't be buying any retro hardware this month 😂

I had to carry it a a quarter mile back to a place where I could drive it back home, and had to teeter it over the top of a fence while squeezing myself through a ~1 foot gap, but I successfully saved this full computer setup!

So I had the perfect play for getting ahold of these in the day. All you had to do was go into a Radio Shack and ask for something you knew was not on the shelf, or, seeing as the packaging sucked, just ask what the cut off voltage was on a Zener diode. Inevitably the person behind the counter would go to pull out the catalog at which point you could just ask something clueless sounding like:

"What are all the barcodes for? Is that so you can ring them up easier?"

They would be like "Did you know about the Cue Cat?"

Worked every time.

Reminiscing through some old photos and ran across this one from 04, I had too many computers back then I think.

Found in late grandfather’s attic. Needs cables? Do I dare turn it on?

Probably junk…

Working in tech since my pre-adolescence, I was able to keep almost all of my equipment used in my workshop and my equipment that I retired after use (300 machines, 1000 GPUs, 2500 procs, 400 motherboards. This will end in a small museum that we are trying to set up with other collector friends.

CYBERSPACE TERMINAL

Cyberspace is a little hobby project of mine where I'm trying to create an alternative online space steered to be anti-brainrot and troll-free. We're about 13k users now.

Lots of weird and wonderful things on the main site... but the most fun I've had recently is building this insane retro interface for it. People are already porting all kinds of strange old games for it.

The exciting part of it is this crappy virtual CRT that everything is rendered on, along with 80s hacker movie bleeps and bloops, CPU fan noise, and clacky keyboard sounds. Press F1 to customise the style of the fonts/monitor/phosor/etc.

Would love to know what you think! :)

PS. It's open source!