
Anachro-PC – The Anachronistic Personal Computer - MindGods
https://jamesmunns.com/blog/anachro-pc-001/
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traverseda
I think there's definitely a market for some kind of "forever PC". A 20 year
old PC is powerful enough to do a lot of stuff, and the really impressive part
is that it wouldn't ever need to change significantly. Maybe something like
the pico-8 "fantasy console" but for anachronistic "personal computing". Build
some minimal apps that aren't user-friendly by today's standards but are nice
and simple to program against and have good and simple UI paradigms.

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michaelmior
I find it interesting that commercial viability is "anti-goal" as opposed to a
"non-goal." I can absolutely understand why practicality isn't the primary
purpose, but why actively avoid it? (Unless I'm just misinterpreting the
terminology.)

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jamesmunns
Just a turn of phrase. I suppose non-goal is more accurate, but as my day job
is building embedded systems in Rust, sometimes it's good to strongly remind
myself to keep hobby and work time separate.

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v-yadli
For anyone wondering about the CIPO /COPI thing instead of MOSI/MISO:

[https://www.oshwa.org/a-resolution-to-redefine-spi-signal-
na...](https://www.oshwa.org/a-resolution-to-redefine-spi-signal-names)

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Jaruzel
Conceptually, throwing a bunch of ICs, glue-logic, and some RAM etc. on a PCB
is dead easy. The stumbling block here is the PC compatible BIOS. Is there an
open source BIOS available that supports all the standard PC BIOS calls ?

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pjc50
The result of the project on that blog will be something that looks very, very
different from the PC compatible! The only thing it will share is the
"personal computer" name.

You probably _could_ build an ISA bus IBM compatible PC out of
microcontrollers, and port one of the open source BIOSes to it, but the
utility of such a thing is questionable.

~~~
Jaruzel
Have you SEEN the price of working 8088/80286 boards on eBay?! :D

Anything that gets people building more homebrew computers is a good thing in
my book.

