Posted by jggonz 9 hours ago
Interesting, it currently says, 'Nobody has yet written the images to 5.25" media and booted an actual XT with them.'
That's no longer the case. Someone that is contributing to the project is using real hardware to validate the changes. You can check out some of the systems he tested it with here: https://www.os8088.com/hardware
The system does currently run with 256KB of RAM, and you can use some of the basic apps, but not all of them.
That said, it's not like something of this nature was thought impossible; many embedded OSes running on even slower and more limited machines (e.g. 8051) had preemptive multitasking and a primitive GUI. It just took several decades for someone with the idea, tokens, and motivation to actually do it.
Claude AI just created something in a few hours, perhaps, that teams of intelligent developers at the time struggled to do in years of effort.
VGA adapter means you have to wait until 1987 to run this, otherwise you'd deal with CGA's non-square pixels. EGA support would only be possible in Oct 1984.
[0] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/b869a0cf44a7e7cbc40...
Technically better software was rarely the primary factor in how the early microcomputer wars played out.
