MenuetOS: Written in Assembly, fits on a floppy, has GUI

http://www.menuetos.net/

by rw • 17 years ago

133 45 17 years ago

menuetos.net

rw• 17 years ago

An interview with two of the developers:

http://www.goodgearguide.com.au/article/315421/we_talk_devel...

yangyang2• 17 years ago

Interesting and impressive.

The 64 bit floppy image runs fine under VirtualBox if you select a 64 bit OS.

stinkytaco• 17 years ago

Virtual Box? It's great that people can try it out and see what it's capable of, but doesn't that sort of defeat the point? I mean, if its real claim to fame is that it's written in assembler than it seems that running it inside a C (is VB C?) application on top of a C operating system would seem to miss its best qualities.

Now if I could only find a floppy around here...

yangyang2• 17 years ago

Well if you want to try it out for a few minutes, as I guess most people on here will, it beats rebooting your PC (or figuring out how to even make it boot on a MacBook). It's not like it's full featured enough for daily use anyway.

I can't really see your point to be honest.

dejan3• 17 years ago

Seemed like a good idea when they first got it out. It seems now like it was soo long ago.

Maybe it is interesting for embedded devices, but seems they've lost their purpose. It was never meant for business, but again, what's the point?

hvs2• 17 years ago

You're reading this on a site called "Hacker News" and you have to ask that? How about: the challenge.

dejan3• 17 years ago

There is a difference between a challenge that is of use for this world, and a challenge just because.

I don't see technological, logical, or knowledge progress in the attempt to write complete OS in assembly (anymore). I've done it myself, in high school, just for fun, a 16bit. That is also when MenuetOS came out. Now I spend my time more wisely. I've actually went on doing things that benefit the society the technology and the users.

Not that menuetOS is bad, but I suggest they reorient them selves so that there is that usable part. And I can see space for it, in embedding computing f.i. Far from having no respect for their work, which I have my hands in from day one.

apotheon2• 17 years ago

That's not just a GUI -- it looks like it supports alpha transparency. That's certainly more than I expected out of a floppy disk.

mhd• 17 years ago

Well, I assume they're usiing straight-forward, direct-to-memory framebuffer manipulation. No X protocol to get in the way, no unavailable GPU drivers. Simple alpha transparency shouldn't be hard to do. When did Porter and Duff write their paper, '83?

kabdib• 17 years ago

You can do a heck of a lot in 1.44MB. The original Mac had a complete GUI plus some applications running from a 400K floppy, plus a 64K ROM.

People forget.

vidarh• 17 years ago

Adding alpha transparency for a framebuffer based GUI need not take more than a few hundred bytes.

apotheon2• 17 years ago

A few hundred bytes is precious space on a floppy.

cubicle67• 17 years ago

Cool, but can I run Erlang on it?

Sapient2• 17 years ago

Reading the changelog belies the complexity of that project... I would dearly love to have the time to take a look at the code for it.

Well done!

kragen4• 17 years ago

Is this belie definition 2, "To tell lies about, esp. to calumniate by false statements", definition 4, "To give a false representation or account of, to misrepresent; to present in a false character", definition 6, "To call (a thing) false practically, to treat it as false by speaking or acting at variance with it; to be false or faithless to", or definition 7, "To show to be false, prove false or mistaken; to falsify (expectations, etc.)"? I don't see how any of those makes sense, given that it's an action by some person being said to belie an attribute of something. (Maybe that would make sense if you were one of the developers and reading the changelog demonstrated that the project's complexity were somehow "false"?)

(OED 1ed. vol. 1 p.782, 806 of 1270 in the PDF)

gdp• 17 years ago

"belie" can also just mean "to be in contradiction with".

Which I assume was the definition being used. As in, "the simplicity of the changelog is in contradiction with the actual complexity of the project".

zokier2• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KolibriOS deserves a mention too, GPL fork of MenuetOS.

hyperbovine• 17 years ago

What's a floppy?

profquail2• 17 years ago

Something that's not to be copied, IIRC.

gcopenhaver• 17 years ago

D-D-Do-Do-Don't...Don't copy.. Don't copy that floppy!

Pistos2• 17 years ago

I have to admit, that's some of the friendliest looking assembly source code I've seen. http://www.menuetos.net/e64.asm Granted, I haven't looked at assembly in over 15 years...

Locke1689• 17 years ago

Decent -- nothing special (if you consider decent as being good code written by smart people). FASM was an interesting choice and I'd like to see their justification for that.

firefoxman1• 17 years ago

Wow it's improved since I tried it about a year ago

hexley• 17 years ago

So does having all the labels in UPPERCASE save that much space?

Novash3• 17 years ago

Amazing. The hardest part probably was to find a floppy drive to read / write the floppy. I don't think I have installed one on my last 2 rigs.

eleitl2• 17 years ago

I would rather see a hand-optimized version of L4, packaged with a kernel for Debian.

Or an OS written in Forth.

Kw2987• 17 years ago

"ForthOS is a complete, standalone operating system for the PC. It includes command line, compiler, debugger, editor, and filesystem."

http://www.forthos.org/

krying_krab2• 17 years ago

Implement a Forth on the OS. If the rest of the OS is in ASM anyway, you can do high-level work in Forth.

kragen4• 17 years ago

Eugen, I have a copy of F-83 if you want it.

eleitl2• 17 years ago

Thanks, I used to hack Forth a bit back in my Amiga days.

I still have my Novix 4000 board I bought used somewhere.

srwh• 17 years ago

I remember similar projects many years ago: - QNX - SqueakOS - SqueakNOS

kragen4• 17 years ago

Linux, ColorForth, GEM, Kontiki, Oberon, the Macintosh System, Microsoft Standalone BASIC, Microsoft Windows, etcetcetc.

zokier2• 17 years ago

I think this kind of projects are good reminders that modern computers have incredible amounts of processing power and storage capacity. If only all that power could be harnessed efficiently....

I also think that legacy cruft is hindering development in computers. One reason why (GNU/)Linux was able to advance so quickly was that it had much less legacy than other systems, allowing more freedom for developers to do stuff better way.

krying_krab2• 17 years ago

Which one is more active, KolibriOS or MenuetOS?

MenuetOS: Written in Assembly, fits on a floppy, has GUI

Related Stories