Dinghy index concept papers




Concept
.

Brief

    What is this about?

        Dinghy: concept for a computer platform.

        Capture the design values of systems from the 16-bit era.

        Improve.

    Those design values -

        Bedrock

            Wariness towards layers of abstraction. Rather, apply Jeff Lait's
            Bedrock principles. System should have a very simple interface.
            Memory model rather than API. Should not occur to you to dive
            lower.

            Slides from Jeff Lait talk about Bedrock

        Mechanical Sympathy

            Feel matters. System should feel responsive, predictable,
            reasonable. Users and developers pick up a sense of mechanical
            sympathy, and feel close to the metal.

            Dave Farley notes on Mechanical Sympathy

        Community-oriented.
        
            Bulletin boards, demo parties, sharing. Vibe that people are proud
            to be part of. A good place for growing new engineers. Honour for
            those who win it.

            Bane comments on the demoscene

    Improvements to pursue -

        Strong network experience: ubiquitous Internet offers more
        community options.

        Async techniques allow sophisticated concurrency.

        Better hardware will allow more speed, and better multitasking.

        Strong standard tools.

    Our pitch -

        "Like CB radio, for the Internet."

        A networked, secure, single-user computer platform that delights
        hackers.

    What would it not be?

        It will not be a 'workstation'.
        
            See Yachts and Racing Dinghies.

            And System Niches.

        "if it has a package manager, it's not what I'm looking for"

        It will not run a web browser.

    Some challenges,

        How to support TCP/IP? There are many systems that seek to facade
        TCP/IP. But that is not our way. What if we went in the opposite
        direction? What is the bedrock alternative to the BSD sockets API?

        Our design values resist complication. Could we incubate an
        alternative to the web? On the simple end: something like gopher.

        Be ambitious. Imagine a vm client. It connects to a remote servers and
        downloads byte code. It communicated back to the server using async
        event messages. Limit

    Audience,

        Developer who loves to be able to reason about everything the system
        is doing.

        Beginner who wants to learn how to think like an engineer.

    Where is the conversation?

        #dinghy on irc.freenode.org

    See the navbar links.


Resources

    TGS desktop notes

        http://rants.tgschultz.com/Personal%20Desktop%20OS.txt

    Muratori videos,

        CygnusEd on an Amiga 2000
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L41oIvre9K0

        The Thirty Million Lines Problem,
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk&t=1350s

    Hacker news thread,

        20190623,
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251010

    Carmack notes on plan 9

        https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=111558698816997&w=4