Hacker News: drivers99

New comment by drivers99 in "Tumble Forth – from assembly to OS with C compiler (2023)"

drivers99 — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:36:06 +0000

Oh yeah, this is right up my alley. I've been thinking about making a Forth on bare metal for a while (made a Forth interpreter in C last summer, and a tiny amount of testing stack manipulation in hand-assembled machine language on a C64U), and the thought I (coincidentally) had moments before seeing this link was about making a boot sector on some floppies I just got for my 8088 IBM PC. I know that will only work for the Real Mode part but it might be fun to start there anyway. Edit: I knew about CollapseOS but didn’t realize this had been around too.

New comment by drivers99 in "Recycle – Floppydisks"

drivers99 — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:28:23 +0000

update for the record: I did get them within a few days

New comment by drivers99 in "I own 28,000 books – here's what I've learned"

drivers99 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 23:25:18 +0000

What makes you say that? I didn't get that feeling at all, and found it pretty interesting as well.

New comment by drivers99 in "Ask HN: What physical publication do you still buy?"

drivers99 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:24:11 +0000

2600 Magazine

New comment by drivers99 in "The Indo-European Family Tree"

drivers99 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:11:42 +0000

pretty interesting etymology connecting Dios, Jupiter, Zeus, etc. (Sky Father)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us

New comment by drivers99 in "Come for ENIAC, Stay for UNIVAC and Skeduflo"

drivers99 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:54:39 +0000

If it looked like the one on the left then it was probably an ENIAC decade ring counter. It could store 1 digit from 0 to 9 and could selectively count pulses to increment the value, with carry to the next one. The 10 tubes on the right (out of 36) were the actual flip flops of the counter.

New comment by drivers99 in "Come for ENIAC, Stay for UNIVAC and Skeduflo"

drivers99 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:27:00 +0000

I recently read a fascinating book I found in the library by an engineer who worked under Mauchly and Eckert and talks about working on ENIAC, BINAC, EDVAC, LARC, and UNIVAC. The book is "From Dits to Bits" by Herman Lukoff.

New comment by drivers99 in "Recycle – Floppydisks"

drivers99 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:14:04 +0000

I wonder if they're having problems. This reminded me I need to get some 5.25" DS/DD 360KB floppies, so I ordered a pack of new ones. After paying at Paypal, it redirected me back and I got a 400 error. I hope I still get them!

New comment by drivers99 in "Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386"

drivers99 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 02:35:30 +0000

I might have to try it out. I have an 8088 IBM PC (my first computer) on a desk. I need to swap out some bad RAM (I've been getting Parity errors and other strange behavior), but it says it works with 256KB so I could remove the AST SixPakPlus altogether. The fully populated mother board has 256KB. (I could also unplug the MFM hard drive controller as well.) It supports CGA and VGA and I have both (the CGA is original; the VGA is an 8-bit ISA one I picked up a couple years ago). I also have a serial mouse... Right now I have one floppy disk that came with a book I re-bought recently (Peter Norton's Guide to Assembly Language) and I could back up the files from it and use that but I think I'd rather buy/find another one to use. And I need more than one disk for this anyway.

Interesting, it currently says, 'Nobody has yet written the images to 5.25" media and booted an actual XT with them.'

New comment by drivers99 in "Everything I Know (1975)"

drivers99 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:49:48 +0000

alphabetical order by title in ASCII terms instead of section

At any rate, the videos just say "Video unavailable" / "This video is unavailable" although there are transcripts.

New comment by drivers99 in "Memo-1: A 6502 computer built from scratch, using a Minitel as its terminal"

drivers99 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:10:02 +0000

Very cool. No surprise when I saw Ben Eater acknowledgement at the bottom. I'd humbly suggest including the CAD (KiCad?) files to go along with the gerbers.

New comment by drivers99 in "Ask HN: Do you see a Pancake in the top left menu at Github.com?"

drivers99 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:18:35 +0000

I created a new account there and have the same thing.

There are some posts about it on /r/github

New comment by drivers99 in "Solving Fermat: Andrew Wiles"

drivers99 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:09:10 +0000

In Firefox, I didn't see a reader view available (I wonder what determines that), but I was able to right click, Inspect, change the background to #ffffff

Personally, I liked the design when zoomed in when combined with the rest of the page design. It reminds me of the 90s (Wired magazine, etc.). "Updated November 2000". That explains it.

New comment by drivers99 in "So, you want to make a game engine (2023)"

drivers99 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:01:31 +0000

What's doomcoding? (It's not mentioned in the article and it doesn't appear to be a related term when I google it.) It sounds negative ("doom" + "we should limit ourselves" from it) but everything you said in the context before that sounds good.

New comment by drivers99 in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

drivers99 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 18:10:34 +0000

I used to be a fan of Zebra Sarasa (retractable, not one of the variations) which I thought was better than the G2, but it wasn't always reliable (maybe they changed something), was more expensive, hard to find in stores (G2 are everywhere though), and accumulates a glob of ink when you draw a line across the page, which ends up wherever you next write something. I happen to have a G2 next to me so I'm testing it for the same problem now, and ended up with a glob somewhere along the long line. I cross things off of todo lists a lot or draw dividers between sections of the page so that happens all the time. Still, it might be a good compromise for the pressure issue for writing sentences.

Not that I'm that price sensitive, it is kind of nice: Sarasa ($2+ each, if you can find it), G2 (~1.25 each), Cristal ($0.10-$0.25 each)

New comment by drivers99 in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

drivers99 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:54:18 +0000

I'm a convert to the idea of just having a cup full of Bic Cristal (cheap, ubiquitous, reliable, replaceable, 76 year old design) ball point pens. Whenever I temporarily misplace one, I just grab another from the cup as I find them. When I'm cleaning up, they all go back to the cup. However, his point about how hard you have to push to write is making me reconsider. On the other hand, I'm also not writing 42 inch high stacks of manuscripts like him.

New comment by drivers99 in "PCjs Machines"

drivers99 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 06:07:21 +0000

Good points. I'm leaning towards keeping it original. For example, I recently got an 8-bit VGA card for it and did some VGA assembly code on it, but then I put the original CGA card back in, even though I have to use a couple external converter boards to actually view the CGA output on a VGA monitor. Having a 90s/2000s era MS-DOS computer for that would be better.

New comment by drivers99 in "PCjs Machines"

drivers99 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 06:04:17 +0000

All good points. One caveat is that this PC only has a full height 5.25" (double sided, double density, 360K) floppy drive. When I got a 486 (Gateway 2000) in 1993, I had them add a 5.25" (as drive B:) to it so I could still at least read floppies from the PC.

New comment by drivers99 in "PCjs Machines"

drivers99 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 21:21:33 +0000

Well, this computer is too old for IDE (but see below). :) Looks like it's something called MFM, driven by an entire expansion card that hooks up to the hard drive. But I get what you mean. My oldest tower is running Windows 2000 (since it has a serial port on the motherboard, it comes in handy... for transferring files to/from the IBM PC.) and that has IDE so I could use that for MS-DOS as well (and would be able to run 90s DOS games etc), I'm sure, but with a ~20 year jump in technology (or about half way between the original IBM PC and today).

Interestingly, https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_8-bit_IDE_Adapter_rev... or better yet https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_ISA_CompactFlash_Adap... looks like it would work if needed, and then using a CF to IDE adapter like you mentioned.

New comment by drivers99 in "PCjs Machines"

drivers99 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:19:07 +0000

I have my IBM PC set up (to go through a Peter Norton assembly language book again) but I got a file read error for the first time recently on the 20 MB (Seagate ST-225) hard drive and parity errors from the RAM (again). I have chips (pretty cheap, industry standard chips) I can swap out to fix it hopefully. Anyway, I could just be emulating it instead (lol).

Cool, they have Exploring the IBM PC. It was a bootable disk with a tutorial to teach you how to use the computer (like what the scroll lock button was meant to do, and all the other keys on the original keyboard). I loaded up the CGA version on the CGA IBM PC emulator, which also plays music. The sound was cutting out though. In a later part (the Fun Writer) when you can turn on the "radio", the music seems to be missing the rests. I guess it's not perfect. The program always struck me as doing strange things with the hardware, so that might be why. (I'll have to look into some local emulators to try out. I really only need DOS for what I'm doing. I also have a MisterFPGA...)