New IBM XT Compatible Motherboard (In ATX form factor)

Github project: GitHub - monotech/NuXT: MicroATX Turbo XT Motherboard, with VGA, Floppy, CF, Serial

Appears to be licensed under the GPLv3 and includes a bios. If that bios has sourcecode this is an interesting libre platform. IBM XT would lack a math coprocessor right? Being pre-486. And it would be a 16bit platform.

Might be possible to get an earlier edition of Minix working out of the box. Might in principle be able to support a μClinux port or a RetroBSD port.

That might be missing the point though, why not just boot it iwth FreeDOS?

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That’s pretty neat! Is there a rolling re-release of classic hardware?

Mirror: https://allthe.codes/mirror/NuXT

Im not sure what the strategy is here per se, just that it looks awesome.

This stuff fascinates me on multiple levels outside of nostalgia or librehardware; that I thought I would mention.

  1. A lot of anarchist theorists ultimately seek to make manufacturing distributed. Computing architectures/hardware tend towards centralized production the more powerful and complex they get. As the equipment and resources needed to make them get more demanding and specialized. I often wonder if the retrocomputing “doing more with less” can therefore be part of that solution. Kind of approaching the problem from the other end. Reducing the architectural complexity needed for some modern tasks.
  2. Older architectures built from modern components tend to be much more power effecient than the original hardware architecture AND modern architectures. By their nature they have the potential for possibly doing some tasks at lower carbon footprints over the long haul.
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That is the exciting part to me. I’d love using a 33MHz processor for things, for example, but I don’t currently because spending 150W to run that seems wasteful.

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