6 ms·
My business card runs Linux and Ultrix (2022)
- cperciva 2y agoMaybe I missed something, but what does this cost?
- dmitrygr 2y agounder $15 ea to build in small quantities, less for more
- clay-dreidels 2y agoThat’s cheaper than I thought.
- deisteve 2y agovery cool
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sys_64738 2y ago[flagged]
- dgfitz 2y agoIt takes a very uneducated mind to make a comment like this. Giants stood on the shoulders of giants for this to be possible.
- xandrius 2y agoMeh. I've heard that now even clouds now run UNIX and WINDOWS so not very interesting. </s>
- Brian_K_White 2y agoIf you didn't read anything but the title, then it's not very remarkable today. Read any random single paragraph from the story and you can no longer say that. Especially the v2 with Ultrix. I never wrote a coff parser & loader from scratch. Or a reimplimentation of scsi itself just to then write some virtual scsi hardware good enough to satisfy a kernel that was hard coded for exactly that hardware down to practically cycle counting and who knows what mystery quirks. (He does, he knows what mystery quirks, now.)
- malux85 2y agoThe result is largely who you became while you build it, not the physical end product.
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoThis is a beautiful comment. Universally applicable. Well said friend.
- joezydeco 2y agoThe PCB edge connector to USB-C is a nice trick. I need to steal that one for my next project.
- rahimnathwani 2y agoI'm confused about that part. He said he used a 0.8mm thick board. But the repo he linked said the board should be 0.6mm. https://github.com/Pinuct/Eagle_PCB_USB_connectors https://github.com/Pinuct/Eagle_PCB_USB_connectors
- dmitrygr 2y ago0.6 is too thin and makes poor contact. 0.7 is best but no board house makes it. 0.8 works.
- qingcharles 2y agoIt's a 32bit 48Mhz CPU, clocked to 90Mhz. I used to run a major EFnet server on Linux on a 25Mhz 386 in about 1996. If you'd given me this business card in the mid-90s, it would have been useable as my primary desktop.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- qup 2y agoIf I could make my eMachine run Linux, this thing would have been a breeze!
- mmoskal 2y agoIt's software emulated though. The actual speed is equivalent to around 1MHz. Intrestingly the tiny Cortex M0+ is has about 4x the coremark per MHz of 386 (and twice 486). See https://www.eembc.org/coremark/scores.php https://www.eembc.org/coremark/scores.php and https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/coremark-mhz https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/coremark-mhz
- RF_Savage 2y agoHere's one with 533MHz ARM926EJ core, 32 megs of RAM and 8 megs of Flash. No emulation here. https://www.thirtythreeforty.net/posts/2019/12/my-business-card-runs-linux/ https://www.thirtythreeforty.net/posts/2019/12/my-business-c...
- qingcharles 2y agoAh, that's the one I remember. That's wild. People mention they bought that CPU for 60 cents. That was five years ago. I think I'd maxed my 386 server out with 8MB of RAM. That chip is the stuff of a madman's dreams in 1996.
- helpfulContrib 2y ago[dead]
- yieldcrv 2y agoeveryone acting like they can’t just reach out to a recruiter for a quarter million dollar job and need these standout things
- schoen 2y agoIn about 2000 we had a "bootable business card" which was a CD-ROM on which we loaded a bootable ISO image that we made with various tools that might be useful to a system administrator. The original version was made to promote Linuxcare. Most CD-ROM drives in PCs had a small inner ring that could hold "mini CDs" with a smaller diameter than a full CD, and a truncated version of this could be a business card CD (which we did not invent; it was commercially available from CD duplicating companies). So, if you had a machine that was broken in some way or you just wanted an ephemeral Linux system, you could take our live CD out of your wallet and boot it in the machine's CD-ROM drive. (Since optical drives are no longer common, nowadays people would use a "live USB" instead of "live CD" for this.) It's so cool that about 20 years of technological progress has taken us from "your business card can be a tiny optical storage medium containing a usable OS image" to "your business card can be a tiny computer containing a usable OS image" (giving a totally new meaning to "bootable business card").
- cbanek 2y agoI remember these! And they weren't exactly circle CD-ROMs either, they had round sides but then straight top and bottom, so you could fit them in a business card holder / wallet. I always thought these were pretty cool.
- 65j56j56 2y agoAny drive that wasn't one where you insert the CD could read those, including portable music players of the time. You could buy mini CD'R's and burn all kinds of mini distros to it.
- tstrimple 2y agoI remember seeing a few of these too. For reference, this is what they typically looked like from my experience. https://mediaduplication.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/flexicd.jpg https://mediaduplication.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
- from-nibly 2y agoI had pokemon TCG on one of those disks. Those were the days.
- dools 2y ago[flagged]
- biztos 2y agoStill not sure what this is, but here it is: https://youtu.be/4YBxeDN4tbk?si=CqumD2CHaNMZ650g https://youtu.be/4YBxeDN4tbk?si=CqumD2CHaNMZ650g
- darby_nine 2y agoI nominate "ultrix" as the most ironic name ever for a piece of software. Not only was it not the last, it turned out to be one of the first!
- starspangled 2y agoDid it derive from ultimate, or ultra (beyond unix)? I assumed the latter.
- darby_nine 2y agoRegardless, it seems like bad branding in retrospect.
- taway1874 2y agoVery impressive! Thanks for sharing.
- HmU7RuewTCeF 2y ago[flagged]
- smfjaw 2y agosubtle off green PCB, my god, that's really nice
- codetrotter 2y agoLet’s see Paul Allen’s PCB!
- HackerQED 2y agoCool, imagine after a collapse of civilization, last survivors dig out this, as the cornerstone to rebuild the old-time industry. This card has such a sci-fi taste.
- WolfCop 2y agoDoes it run Doom?
- dmitrygr 2y agoIt can
- unixhero 2y agoThe tenacity if this guy is insane.
- dextrous 2y agoI must say, I love the tagline “creating order out of chaos (or reverse if needed)”
- khqc 2y agoJust from the schematic, it took me longer than necessary to figure out the leftmost symbol was for USB-C
- zaps 2y agoImpressive, but does it come in eggshell with Romalian type?
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoBut it's the watermark that makes it.
- sweeter 2y agothis is amazing! the one sin you've committed is not running neofetch / fetch lol. I want to learn a lot more about booting in this aspect. It seems pretty neat that all it really does is load a couple of addresses that then look for an ELF binary vmlinux that is parsed and ran. Seems fairly simple all things considered.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
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- mjevans 2y agoThat Atmel chip sounds like quite a heck to work with... the DMA section alone. Also related, 'Improving RAM bandwidth' section. The author's final conclusion about the chip... "Thanks for nothing, Atmel." I wonder if there are better options available today, but I fear anything useful might involve BGA or similar surface mount techniques.
- dmitrygr 2y ago> I wonder if there are better options available today Rp2350. That’s what I’m basing my next revision of this project on
- mjevans 2y agohttps://www.raspberrypi.com/products/rp2350/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/rp2350/ 0.5MB RAM and 4MB of flash might not sound like a lot, but that's plenty for many micro computer system environments.
- dmitrygr 2y agoIt supports QSPI PSRAM natively. So it’ll be a lot faster than doing in manually on ATSAMD21
- mmoskal 2y agoAlso M33 vs M0 and higher clock - should be 2-3x faster. And maybe you can do something with the second core. Im super impressed you got this to work! The memories of the SAMD clocks... Shudders.
- mjevans 2y agoI found an older HN thread from about a month ago while trying to learn more about the RP2350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41214307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41214307 It seems that it didn't get much coverage at the time.
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- monocasa 2y agoNo PalmOS, Dmitry? Lol, I kid, this is awesome.
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- 3zLwMxqEdU7f 2y ago[flagged]
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- jmclnx 2y agoVery Cool!
- mightyhacker658 2y ago[dead]