back when the Apple II / Applesoft BASIC twitter bot was a thing similar techniques were the best way to inject assembly language into a BASIC program, though we quickly learned there were more compact ways than REM to get a line ignored.
Some examples here, as sadly the apple2twitter bot shut down and deleted their account a while ago.
When I did that on Pi3 when it first came out you could crash the system because the thermal throttling wasn't fast enough (the temp sensor was on the GPU not CPU). When I reported the issue on the pi forums the answer was essentially "why would anyone ever want to do that"
I don't know how many of you have seen a 1541 floppy drive in person either but it is massive, it's heavier and possibly bigger that an actual Commodore 64 and pretty expensive at the time too.
it's fun seeing c64 people on the defensive about it, a nice change from getting lectures from them about how their graphics were the pinnacle of 8-bit computing
way back in the day our college LUG (linux user group) had a rep from VA Linux come to speak, but the person running things was unfamiliar with the company and kept calling them "Virginia Linux"
at the time, just out of undergrad, I ended up working for the remnants of the #9 Video Card company that had been bought by S3 and was masking a last effort at making a Linux-based Transmeta-powered "web-pad" (tablet): the "Frontpath ProGear" (new management wouldn't let them give it a Beatles related name that #9 equipment used to get)
in any case due to the unfortunate timing of the dot-com implosion it never really went anywhere (I wish I had managed to keep one, they used to appear on ebay occasionally)
the one thing I remember is that it was memory limited, it had 64MB but I think the code-morphing software really wanted 16MB of it which really cut into the available system memory
saying "windows 98 was bad too" is just an example that Microsoft has always had poor code quality. Back in the day Linux, for all its flaws, was generaly a lot more stable on the same hardware.
microsoft has a lot to answer for after 50 years of normalizing poor quality software
as someone who has written my own OS from scratch (vmwOS) and teach a class on it, I have to agree with a lot of the other comments that x86-based OS projects do end up being exercises in 40-year old PC/x86 retrocomputing.
A few years ago I would have recommended the path I took (writing an OS for the Raspberry Pi) but the Pis have gone off the rails recently. So writing a simple OS for a Pi-1B+ is relatively doable (simple enough, sort of OK documentation, biggest downside is needing USB for the keyboard).
Things led to disaster once everyone wanted to use Pi4 (which was all we could manage to source during the CPU shortage of '23) as the documentation is poor, getting interrupts going became nearly impossible, and the virtual memory/cache/etc setup on the 64-bit cores (at least a few years ago) was not documented well at all.
as someone who has built various raspberry pi clusters over the years (I even got an academic paper out of one) the big shame is that as far as I know it's still virtually impossible to use the fairly powerful GPUs they have for GPGPU work
ironically, you should be thanking Apple that the IBM PC exists
The Apple II was an open system and IBM clearly took a lot of inspiration from the Apple II line. Look at the 5150 motherboard in the picture in the article and compare it to the motherboard from an Apple II+
I had thought maybe it was on the old 0xdeadbeef mailing list, but no luck, but probably it was this from rec.humor.funny which in the end isn't quite as clever as I remember it being.
dating myself here but I remember in the 90s reading a really funny spoof article about Microsoft announcing they had developed nuclear weapons. Didn't even seem that implausible at the time.
I would have linked it here but none of the search engines are turning up anything at all, and in fact I don't think it's even possible to find stuff like that with search engines anyore.
it's already happened. So many of the main contributors work for IBM, Microsoft, and Intel. It's extremely difficult to have your voice heard / patches accepted if you're just a hobbyist developer
I've gone to the extreme of writing my own OS because I got fed up with how corporate Linux has gotten
it's funny that a lot of us Linux nuts on comp.os.linux.advocacy back in the 90s predicted this was Microsoft's planned endgame. I personally thought it would take less than 30 years for them to get around to it though.
my plan to rick-roll every major coding competition continues apace. muahahaha
I actually had another entry that I felt had much more clever coding that did some nice sixel animations but from what I understand there were many entries also doing that this year
I think you'll find more systems used DRAM than SRAM.
The Apple II was one of the first 6502 systems to use DRAM (in 1977) and Woz was incredibly clever in getting the refresh for free as a side effect of the video generation
I have to say as a 6502 assembly programmer I have wasted many hours of my life tracking down the same issue in my code (forgetting to put an # in front of an immediate value and thus accidentally doing a memory access instead). Often it's like this case too where things might accidentally work some of the time.
Worse than the floating-bus in this example is when it depends on uninitialized RAM which is often consistent based on DRAM so the code will always work on your machine/emulator but won't on someone else's machine with different DRAM chips (invariably you catch this at a demoparty when it won't run on the party machine and you only have 15 minutes to fix it before your demo is about to be presented)
Some examples here, as sadly the apple2twitter bot shut down and deleted their account a while ago.
http://deater.net/weave/vmwprod/appleiibot/part7.html