Absolutely mad history here:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569438" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569438</a> (2019)<p>As a teaser, from the above:<p><i>> For those not aware of the background, the author is a wizard from a secretive underground society of wizards known as the Familia Toledo; he and his family (it is a family) have been designing and building their own computers (and ancillary equipment like reflow ovens) and writing their own operating systems and web browsers for some 40 years now.</i>
Kind of reminds me of writing single-sector bootloaders¹ for the Apple ][. The idea was that you wouldn’t have DOS on a floppy disk to free up that storage for other stuff, but then if you accidentally turned on your computer with that disk in the drive, you’d want a nice message letting you know you messed up and a prompt so you could put in a DOS disk and boot up properly.<p>⸻<p>1. It might have been a whole track on the disk, it’s hard to remember the details of this when it’s 37 years since I last used an Apple ][.
Reminds me of the 256 byte OS I made, which was really just a BrainFuck ripoff with a prompt. Went on to make a huge assembler and "kernel" for it.