We don’t have to be. It’s just that people like the nostalgia aspect and it gives a de-facto standard with some degree of preexisting hardware to coalesce around.
To have a complete grasp of the software stack, complexity has to be controlled, of course… so the typical offerings are 32 bit architectures with a few MB of memory and an SD card for storage, and if a “GPU” is included it’s usually just another MCU or core acting as the graphics processor.
There are a lot of good cyberdeck options built around the ESP32 and RP2040, for example. While some of these are used primarily as emulators, others run arbitrary code or projects like meshtastic.
I would love to see, though, a simple OS that actually provides a shell and multitasking ability that is designed to run on these platforms, idk if anything like that exists.
It would be super cool to have a python REPL, a text editor, file browser, gopher client, MUD client, things like that running with alt-t to switch context or something like that.
There has to be a small Unix-like OS that could fit an RP2040 or ESP32. No MMU might be a deal-breaker for a more complete (and secure) OS, but we don’t need all that functionality in every form factor.
I’ve been hoping for this as well, but so far I haven’t seen anything that isn’t so limited as to be unusable for anything other than saying “look, a shell!” Can’t run programs from the shell etc.
To have a complete grasp of the software stack, complexity has to be controlled, of course… so the typical offerings are 32 bit architectures with a few MB of memory and an SD card for storage, and if a “GPU” is included it’s usually just another MCU or core acting as the graphics processor.
There are a lot of good cyberdeck options built around the ESP32 and RP2040, for example. While some of these are used primarily as emulators, others run arbitrary code or projects like meshtastic.
I would love to see, though, a simple OS that actually provides a shell and multitasking ability that is designed to run on these platforms, idk if anything like that exists.
It would be super cool to have a python REPL, a text editor, file browser, gopher client, MUD client, things like that running with alt-t to switch context or something like that.