Once upon a time in the mysterious lands of Mexico, starting in Fall 1996 and through Spring 1997, I coded a windowed operating system in 32-bit machine code, fit it into a floppy, and jumped in excitement as it boot up.
Of course, I knew it was a great thing because you couldn’t boot Windows 3.1 or GEM from a floppy disk, but I was very far from knowing how so cool it was. Unfortunately, not a thing I could give away for everyone to see, as it was written for a homebrew computer based on the Am29000 processor.
Let’s go back to my memories, some notes, and the ride of discovering again what I forgotten.
↫ Óscar Toledo Gutiérrez
Trying to summarise this absolute gem of an article and all of the amazing effort and skill involved would be a huge disservice to Óscar Toledo Gutiérrez. I enjoyed this so much. Be sure to try out his custom emulator of a custom computer to run his custom operating system.
The article itself made for great Saturday morning reading after getting home from a beach vacation, but this last line was perfect. As a QNX fan of an age with the author, this made my day!
Oh man! Hook it to my veins! I built a fairly decent (actually interactive) windowed UI for DOS 8086/286 machines back in the late 80s and you really learn to compress your data and build some nice algos. But… AM29K. Sweet – gotta love some obscure (by modern standards) processors. I’d love to recode my GUI for MC88K!
“I remember downloading QNX in 1999 and running it in a 1.44mb floppy disk on a PC, and thinking “Gosh! I did it first.””
If I remember correctly the first Atari 520ST in 1985 booted TOS from floppy because it was not finished on time to put in ROM.
Theoretically you could also count the A1000s Kickrom. Though it did not boot into the Desktop without the additionally necessary Workbench disk. So that were 2 disks.
But nevertheless a feat for such a young guy then. I “wrote” my first OS thanks to Thom with help of a tutorial at 54.
It was interesting as hell.