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cperciva
Maybe I missed something, but what does this cost?
dmitrygr
under $15 ea to build in small quantities, less for more
[dead] sys_64738
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dgfitz
It takes a very uneducated mind to make a comment like this. Giants stood on the shoulders of giants for this to be possible.
xandrius
Meh. I've heard that now even clouds now run UNIX and WINDOWS so not very interesting. </s>
Brian_K_White
If you didn't read anything but the title, then it's not very remarkable today.

Read any random single paragraph from the story and you can no longer say that. Especially the v2 with Ultrix.

I never wrote a coff parser & loader from scratch. Or a reimplimentation of scsi itself just to then write some virtual scsi hardware good enough to satisfy a kernel that was hard coded for exactly that hardware down to practically cycle counting and who knows what mystery quirks. (He does, he knows what mystery quirks, now.)

malux85
The result is largely who you became while you build it, not the physical end product.
BLKNSLVR
This is a beautiful comment. Universally applicable. Well said friend.
qingcharles
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.

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

yieldcrv
everyone acting like they can’t just reach out to a recruiter for a quarter million dollar job and need these standout things
schoen
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
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
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.
from-nibly
I had pokemon TCG on one of those disks. Those were the days.
Doxin
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
They were cool, until you loaded them into a 4 cd autoloader and they got stuck. Not that I ever did that... :)
darby_nine
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
Did it derive from ultimate, or ultra (beyond unix)? I assumed the latter.
darby_nine
Regardless, it seems like bad branding in retrospect.
taway1874
Very impressive! Thanks for sharing.
smfjaw
subtle off green PCB, my god, that's really nice
HackerQED
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.

unixhero
The tenacity if this guy is insane.
dextrous
I must say, I love the tagline

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

khqc
Just from the schematic, it took me longer than necessary to figure out the leftmost symbol was for USB-C
zaps
Impressive, but does it come in eggshell with Romalian type?
BLKNSLVR
But it's the watermark that makes it.
sweeter
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.
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mjevans
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.

dmitrygr
> I wonder if there are better options available today

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

mjevans
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.

dmitrygr
It supports QSPI PSRAM natively. So it’ll be a lot faster than doing in manually on ATSAMD21
mmoskal
Also M33 vs M0 and higher clock - should be 2-3x faster. And maybe you can do something with the second core.

Im super impressed you got this to work! The memories of the SAMD clocks... Shudders.

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monocasa
No PalmOS, Dmitry?

Lol, I kid, this is awesome.