Duly noted, thanks. Hardware has long been a mystery to me, but it never really clicked (the epiphany never really happened) that the direction to go in to sol

Duly noted, thanks. Hardware has long been a mystery to me, but it never really clicked (the epiphany never really happened) that the direction to go in to solve that mystery was to mess around with writing a toy OS. I get that now (and finally understand the raft of almost-useless toy OSes out there). Thankfully, I have an idea of the simple UI environment I'd want to build on top (I've actually been noncomittally noodling a few ideas for some time), and would very likely be able to nicely make do with cooperating multitasking, etc - so it shouldn't be too hard. Which is nice. Some of my ideas involve working with a number of different architectures, too (ARM, 68k, etc), so I'd finally be learning asm for several different chipsets, as well. Stares at atrophied discipline muscles ...Eventually. As an aside, I have a possible startpoint that may be interesting: a GSoC project got Lua running under SYSLINUX a couple years ago. One of the examples showed how to call VBE to set the graphics mode, and plot pixels. SYSLINUX does UEFI now. If a Lua-callable EFI graphics library became available... ooooo. Literally all CPUs are so fast at 2D, you could write whole UXes on top of that. (Maybe add AC97 too, and finally put the MOD/WAV player in gfxboot out of its misery.)