Ass my embler, i’ll be damned!
Okay, i'm a man, so it's time to man up, and admit that my college professor might have had a point after all. I thought this cooky old unix guru was out of his mind when he whipped out x86 assembly for us, but fuck. I'll have to admit that you can do something with assembly worth while. Something that's actually really fucking fast, and cool.
MenuetOS. It's a small operating system, that is made from scratch, with assembly. Yeah, that shit! It comes with a gui, and it fits on a fucking floppy disk. Yeah, the 1.44 MB kind. I put it on a usb stick, and booted it successfully on my Thinkpad X41, however, the 64 bit flavor would not boot on my Phenom machine. I'm not man enough to debug it. It came to the GUI, but then ground to a halt, and just froze the system, so i had to do a reboot.
It works really fast on my thinkpad, and it has all kinds of demos, games, editors, terminals, network clients and servers. Hell you could set up a web server within a second or two. It was that fast. I didn't try the web, since it obviously didn't have any WLAN drivers (and i didn't have an ethernet cord standing by). But it bloody well worked. Damned.
Good job. I'm not sure if one of the makers is Finnish, but i'm pretty sure: his name is Ville Turjanmaa. Give it a try, and help out if you are man enough to chop off your own penis.. i mean.. grok assembly.
The BBS Documentary
I was listening to Off the Hook (episode of May 14, 2009) and they had on there a premium for people pledging money for the station, where if you pledged 75 dollars or more, you could have the BBS Documentary on DVD.
This is a documentary on the BBS age. They interview a bunch of people who lived through that era during the 70's and 80's where people dialed in to these computers and could talk to people, share files and so on. It's a whole culture, that existed before the graphical world wide web, which really kicked off in the early 90's. I remember that time, though i wasn't using BBS's in the 70's or 80's, i was using them in the early 90's.
The documentary looks amazing, i was looking at some clips from it. It's for sale here, and you can get it in some cool-looking bundles, such as the DVD collection of ANSI art called "Dark Domain", and another documentary called "Commodorks" for a total price of 60 US dollars, plus shipping.
The documentary is licenced under Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike licence (1), meaning: "Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these. Derivative works have to be released under the same licence." Because of this, you can download this documentary legally. But, if you like it (like i did), consider supporting the author, and getting the DVD or bundles from their site, which can be found here. If you want the download, you could use this torrent, or this site which offers a lot of formats, such as the open-source friendly OGG.
(1) Source: Wikipedia, Creative Commons Licenses