Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

A filesystem, a shell, a program loader, and a hex editor! Well, maybe "editor" is overselling it. But from my point of view, it's as much an "OS" as MS-DOS was. MS-DOS also depended on the ROM BIOS.

I agree that it's probably not practically useful. But it's a brilliant hack!

View on HN

Yes, BootOS very much in the same space as MS-DOS, although leaning even further on the "less-is-more" axis. It does the same basic things (though I suppose it doesn't do the BASIC thing).

Interestingly, there is modern OS in the same space. That's UEFI. Unti I played with it a few months ago, I thought it was some mysterious firmware-adjacent black-box. But actually it's just an OS, very similar to DOS (though it runs in protected mode).

It has a shell and some basic built-in commands including text editors and such. And most importantly it lets you run executables that a stored on a FAT (well, FAT32) filesystem.

The name BootOS could very well describe UEFI. And equally, a slightly more capable version of BootOS could serve as (very underpowered) UEFI replacement.

I may be confused here, but I don't think UEFI includes a shell — although there's a shell called UEFI-Shell which you can install on your hard disk and run under UEFI — and I think UEFI doesn't have any way to enter machine code from the keyboard. In fact, I think even UEFI-Shell doesn't have any way to enter machine code from the keyboard; is that true? Also, am I mistaken about the status of UEFI-Shell?

So, although I am not planning to switch my laptop to running BootOS, I think there are some significant things BootOS can do that UEFI can't.

> though I suppose it doesn't do the BASIC thing

What's this then?

   bootOS programs: (Oh yes! we have software support)

   fbird         https://github.com/nanochess/fbird
   Pillman       https://github.com/nanochess/pillman
   invaders      https://github.com/nanochess/invaders
   bootBASIC     https://github.com/nanochess/bootBASIC

And one can test the image:

"find a pre-designed disk image along this Git with the name osall.img"

Yeah, PC-DOS was able to invoke the BASIC interpreter included in the IBM PC ROM, but MS-DOS had to rely on GW-BASIC loaded as a separate executable, which might or might not be present. BootOS is the same, except that its BASIC is only 512 bytes and somewhat more limited than GW-BASIC, but astoundingly it is documented to include a full arithmetic precedence parser with parentheses. No string variables or floating point, but still, unbelievable.

The Basic in BootOS has also REPL, line editing of the Basic source and the backspace also works.

Also note the "system" command which returns you to the "shell" of BootOS. It works!

I meant that UEFI doesn't have a BASIC interpreter (though probably someone has written one).

I did not know that bootOS had one, but it does not surprise me given everything else I read on this thread.

> I meant that UEFI doesn't have a BASIC interpreter (though probably someone has written one).

You wrote something else:

> Yes, BootOS very much in the same space as MS-DOS, although leaning even further on the "less-is-more" axis. It does the same basic things (though I suppose it doesn't do the BASIC thing).

Yah, sorry about that. I replied before checking my memory of what I had written.

I thought I caught the error and deleted the erroneous response in time. But I didn't.

Well, bootBASIC isn't included in the boot sector; it's a separate 512-byte program that can be loaded from the boot sector or by BootOS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com