Author of the AI written os8088 OS here...

Thanks for sharing the promotional video for Visi On. It's cool to see how many different companies gave this a shot back in the 80s.

This kinda almost makes it sound like VisiOn introduced Gates to the GUI which is not true. They were already using and developing for Macintosh machines at Microsoft and had hired Charles Simonyi from PARC with his expertise in GUI systems before Comdex 1982.

The story seems to be more that seeing VisiOn gave MS the nudge to get into action on the GUI due to a sense of competition/urgenbcy from VisiOn rather than learning about the GUI from VisiOn.

From the landing page:

> 66,183 lines of hand-written real-mode assembly

Goes to the github - contributers jggonz and CLAUDE. The README.md doubles down on this at the bottom with the license.

> Everything here is hand-written; no third-party code is vendored into the OS, so the whole tree is covered by that one license.

That's what happens when you let an LLM write your ad-copy...

And LLMs are still confidently bullshitting:

> Everything after that is the interface you remember from a 1984 Macintosh: […] and a dock along the bottom with one tile per running program.

In that case I look forward to seeing OS X’s Aqua ported to the IBM PS/2.

"Author" of os8088 here. You're right, it's hand-prompted.

Claude's Opus and Fable have done a really great job helping me and another contributor shape this operating system. It's been a really interesting way to learn about the different techniques that other operating systems have used to get the performance we saw in LisaOS, MacOS, Windows, GEOS, etc... performance at 640x480 on an XT class machine is tricky! Also, the 64KB segment limitations were very interesting to overcome!

I’ve got nothing against AI-written code

But if people are going to post it on HN, they should consider at least writing the README / main page of their website by hand

It is nice to hear the human authorial voice, at least sometimes

I'm surprised Claude is actually decent at real-mode Asm, but maybe there was a lot of attempts and guidance by the human.

For me personally there’s something deeply unsatisfying about hobby projects that are entirely AI generated. Work code is something different.

This is never going to be a commercially viable project. It’s a wonderful idea for a hobbyist passion project. But if you’re not actually coding it yourself it feels far less interesting.

There are both pro- and anti-AI factions here... and those with more nuanced views.

Personally, I don't care as long as the end result is good, but a lot of AI software tends to be in the lower end of the quality range.

There's a difference between using AI to automate some drudge work of stuff that would just be mentally tedious to do (writing an operating system for an 8088 in assembly? Tedious, unless you're one of the rare people whose mind does well with that sort of thing), and just not even being bothered to write your own readme files and project description.

At least take the time to hand write a description of what it is and acknowledge the tool assistance as a known fact.

Making fake claims that something is totally hand written is I think what bothers people about this.

Different groups, the spammers like to congratulate each other for how much hard work they must have put into their very impressive prompt engineering. Regardless, AI code is distinct from extremely blatant AI design. People dismiss things that had no actual design, just whatever fell out of the prompt they gave it. If you can't write a single human paragraph or put thought and care into how you are presenting 'your' project, it's not worth paying attention to. Why can't they present their own work honestly? Why would I spend energy looking at an OS made by someone who can't write an HTML file by themself?

I can pour myself a bowl of cheerios. That doesn’t mean I’m easily impressed by someone else preparing a similar bowl of cereal.

Though, I have been finding a lot of utility in programs that support otherwise deprecated hardware, now that is some good slop.

It’s almost like those are two different populations of people?

Well there was GeoWorks (which AOL used the GUI of to their advantage):

https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos

Just discovered the videos (https://www.youtube.com/@NostalgiaPCTV) ...and the source code on github reads like a book.

Amazing.

"Author" of os8088 here. That's unfortunate. This is a hobby, and yes, it's all written with Claude. I have a bunch of videos up showing the process.

I'm updating the copy of the page to make it extremely clear that it's built using AI so that we can move past that point.

Yeah if someone had spent 6 months coding this dead end from 1978 in assembly rather than getting Claude to do it in six days then I’d have given it more time too.

"Author" of os8088 here. I love seeing what these early limited system could do! Someone shared a video of GOS with me after seeing what os8088 looked like.

I believe os8088 also boots now with just 128k of RAM, but it's very limited in the type of apps you can load. There's a os8088.com/hardware page where one of the contributors to the project that has been helping optimize the operating system tested it out on a bunch of different machines.

The original MacOS lacked memory protection too. It had cooperative multi-tasking, starting at version 7. Before that, the only thing that could be launched next to the main application were "desk accessories", which were a bit of a pain to write, as they had to stay out of harm's way.

Yes, it's easy to break. There's no memory protection. However, building packages, drivers, and kernel modules for it has been a fun and educational exercise in memory management.

> If you don't have protected mode, can't any program just rewrite the interrupt handler?

Yes? It's still possible to make it safe if you ensure that all programs are written in a memory safe language. Aside from throwing out a ton of existing code it's not as bad as it sounds. The Birth and Death of JavaScript touches on it towards the end.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

We have built in driver support now, so we will be adding network driver support soon. We just added hard drive support that is potentially a bit buggy...