My business card runs Linux and Ultrix (2022)

http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=33.%20LinuxCard

by caned • 2 years ago

192 43 2 years ago

dmitry.gr

cperciva• 2 years ago

Maybe I missed something, but what does this cost?

dmitrygr5• 2 years ago

under $15 ea to build in small quantities, less for more

clay-dreidels• 2 years ago

That’s cheaper than I thought.

deisteve• 2 years ago

very cool

joezydeco• 2 years ago

The PCB edge connector to USB-C is a nice trick. I need to steal that one for my next project.

rahimnathwani• 2 years ago

I'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

dmitrygr5• 2 years ago

0.6 is too thin and makes poor contact. 0.7 is best but no board house makes it. 0.8 works.

qingcharles2• 2 years ago

It'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.

qup• 2 years ago

If I could make my eMachine run Linux, this thing would have been a breeze!

mmoskal2• 2 years ago

It'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 and https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/coremark-mhz

RF_Savage• 2 years ago

Here'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-c...

yieldcrv• 2 years ago

everyone acting like they can’t just reach out to a recruiter for a quarter million dollar job and need these standout things

schoen• 2 years ago

In 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• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

Any 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• 2 years ago

I 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/20...

from-nibly• 2 years ago

I had pokemon TCG on one of those disks. Those were the days.

Doxin• 2 years ago

They came in all sorts of shapes. I distinctly recall jars of peanut butter having shirt-shaped ones in the lid for a while. Something like this[0]. As I understand it since CDs are written from the inside-out, you can make them roughly any shape you like as long as it's more or less balanced. You'll just lose capacity.

[0] http://www.dvdreplication.co.nz/packaging/dvd-cases/mini_sha...

_joel• 2 years ago

They were cool, until you loaded them into a 4 cd autoloader and they got stuck. Not that I ever did that... :)

darby_nine2• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

Did it derive from ultimate, or ultra (beyond unix)? I assumed the latter.

darby_nine2• 2 years ago

Regardless, it seems like bad branding in retrospect.

taway1874• 2 years ago

Very impressive! Thanks for sharing.

smfjaw• 2 years ago

subtle off green PCB, my god, that's really nice

codetrotter• 2 years ago

Let’s see Paul Allen’s PCB!

HackerQED• 2 years ago

Cool, 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• 2 years ago

Does it run Doom?

dmitrygr5• 2 years ago

It can

unixhero• 2 years ago

The tenacity if this guy is insane.

dextrous• 2 years ago

I must say, I love the tagline

“creating order out of chaos (or reverse if needed)”

khqc• 2 years ago

Just from the schematic, it took me longer than necessary to figure out the leftmost symbol was for USB-C

zaps• 2 years ago

Impressive, but does it come in eggshell with Romalian type?

BLKNSLVR• 2 years ago

But it's the watermark that makes it.

sweeter• 2 years ago

this 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.

mjevans3• 2 years ago

That 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.

dmitrygr5• 2 years ago

I wonder if there are better options available today

Rp2350. That’s what I’m basing my next revision of this project on

mjevans3• 2 years ago

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.

monocasa• 2 years ago

No PalmOS, Dmitry?

Lol, I kid, this is awesome.

jmclnx• 2 years ago

Very Cool!

My business card runs Linux and Ultrix (2022)

Related Stories