Neotron - The Embedded Rust Home Computer Platform

submited by
Style Pass
2021-06-23 13:30:07

Neotron is an attempt to make computers simple again, whilst also taking advantage of the very latest in programming language development. We are saddened by chat clients that require multi-Gigabyte installs, and systems with hundreds of millions of lines of source code that no one person could ever hope to understand. We want to build a machine that is sized for an individual to comprehend, not a trillion-dollar corporation.

Looking back at classic home computers of the 1980s and early 1990s though, we see systems that were (and still are) simple enough to understand, or even - with time - to learn to master. Here's a rough comparison with just a few of the classic systems we have taken as inspiration (where not otherwise specified, these are the first version launched of a given system):

The IBM PC BIOS was stored in a ROM chip on the motherboard. It provided a certain level of hardware abstraction, with APIs for writing to the screen, setting the video mode and reading/writing from block devices such as floppy drives. The BIOS initialised the hardware, loaded the first sector of a chosen block device into RAM and then executed the code contained within. This was the Boot Sector and contained enough code to load the rest of the Operating System. PC-DOS made use of BIOS APIs, but often games would bypass both MS-DOS and the BIOS and access hardware directly. Famously, Microsoft was able to sell copies of PC-DOS (relabelled as MS-DOS) to manufacturers of 'PC compatibles', provided they had a BIOS ROM which offered the same (reverse-engineered) API as the IBM BIOS.

Leave a Comment