Homebrew OS design group!

This is the wrong group for writing OS. I don't know what is the right group for your messages, but this group is not. Unless you are talking about the politics of writing OS.

comp.arch.embedded might be suitable.

Unless, as you said, it has to do with Obamacare or politics in general, in which case this here group would work :-)

Oh, no. real embedded controller don't use OS.

Or whether Obama's missles or Bush's Humvees are better for the electronics industry or the US economy in general. Which projects wasted more money in electronics?

There are already a zillion groups for homebrew OS. Google linux. Pick any one.

RTOS'es are sometimes discussed there. Embedded folks occasionally need them. I am mulling same for an embedded project right now but will probably go sans OS.

The transputer maybe? Or OS/2.

It doesn't work as a debating group for politics - only as a soapbox.

With electronics, we sometimes persuade one another that a particular point of view is better, but that doesn't seem to happen with politics.

I've yet to persuade anybody that the Tea Party is a bunch of political lemmings, devoted to making the Republican Party unelectable, and none of the counter-arguments I've seen have been remotely persuasive.

The transputer worked. We used one for heavy number crunching in the IASys biosensor unit at Affinity Sensors, Bar Hill, Cambridge CB3 8SL, UK. That was back in 1992. Eventually the march of semiconductor technology washed it way.

Reputedly better than what Microsoft had at the time, but by then IBN wasn't big enough to persuade enough people to use it. Betamax versus JVC ....

Actually Sony invented VHS but decided to sell it off and develop a better quality format.

That does not contradict what you said, but is an interesting point of triv ia that not many people know.

Another thing is that the COMB filter was already invented, in Germany. thi s is something I found out recently. I thought Sony invented it because it is essential to the color under video recording scheme.

Well alost essential. Without it they could never have achievd the recordin g times they did. The rotating phase of the color subcarrier and COMB filte r to clean it up made guard bands uneecessary. Althought eh COMB filter oin a VCR, especially usedd with a COMB filter in the monitor, causes a certai n kind of picture degradation that the trained eye can discern.

But that is just more useless knowledge.

That would definitively be a better place.

Writing your own OS (or at least RTOS kernel) sound very 1980sh, when nearly every company that I worked with had their own RTOS for 8 bitters.

Of course, it is still a challenge to write very small and really fast pre-emptive kernels for a specific processor. With 1 .. 4 KiB of code should be enough for a usable RTOS kernel.

Linux is no longer homebrew; it is bloatware and getting fatter.

On a sunny day (Mon, 29 Sep 2014 18:36:09 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in :

I did a system like that on my own Philips BW LDL100O video tape recorder to make it a color. The chroma is converted from 4.43 MHz to about 560 kHz (x times fh), and then sort of superimposed on the video FM modulation on disk. Like in audio modulating the bias. The comb filter (did not use it) is not essential to all this. The trick was simply that speed variations were canceled and the output chroma frequency was constant, and this is used in VHS. I remember reading about it in 'Radio Electronica', a Dutch magazine in those days, shortly after we had the first Sony Umatics demonstrated in the studio. Those sucked a lot... So after reading that, I thought 'let me try that', worked on just one euro card with a few transistors on it... Then somebody showed 'my system' to somebody from Sony, guy was not interested, (He told us: 'We have many systems on the shelves'). I dunno who invented it, but it was fun to play with. And that system grabbed the market eventually as VHS, but indeed with many improvements. Umatic tapes were used in semi-prof video recording for a while, but the demodulator was a pulse detector, so any dropout in the tapes cause huge spikes in the video that did over-drive the amps and caused huge white flashes on the screens, leaving many old recording useless. Its actually easy to fix, I've done that too. As to OS (back to OP's subject), you can download a Z80 CP/M emulator/ clone? from my site:

On Mon, 29 Sep 2014 14:54:16 -0700, mike Gave us:

That would be "home brew distro" dipshit.

You lack the literacy even for Usenet. Why am I not surprised?

On Tue, 30 Sep 2014 10:12:22 +0300, snipped-for-privacy@downunder.com Gave us:

Depends on if communication is involved.

On Tue, 30 Sep 2014 01:08:02 -0700, Robert Baer Gave us:

He is bent in the brain anyway, and doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.

A reference to an entire global realm of "me too" distros, and "well done" distros is NOT a reference to "home brew OS" realm stuff.

Try something like RISCOS or the like.

A good list for just the ARM cpu category:

"RISCOS" looked pretty nice.

I can't figure out if you are trying to say that RiscOS was homebrew, or that it was /not/ homebrew. For the record, it was never homebrew, as it was written by a company (Acorn - the same folks that designed the ARM).

Linux was originally homebrew, as it was written at home by a student as a hobby. But it quickly moved into the mainstream, with support and backing from professional companies.

That'll have Stallman spitting blood, with some justification.

The Linux kernel was written by a student. The rest of the system came from the GNU project, which had been around for the best part of a decade.

No, Stallman would agree 100% here - because he is particularly keen to point out that "Linux" means just the kernel. The complete system should, in his opinion, be known as GNU/Linux.

Like most people, I say "Linux" when I mean the complete systems, including not only the shells and basic utilities, which are often gnu software, but also X and Gnome, KDE, or whatever if it is a gui system. So in that sense you are correct - it is just the kernel that was originally homebrew.

my group is about ALL operating systems (RIOS, RISCOS, x86 OS, Z80 OS, etc.)

How about a modern version of the transputer, say 128 bits wide as a one-upsmanship on the stupid 64 bit craze?