For those not aware of the background, the author is a wizard from a secretive underground society of wizards known as the Familia Toledo; he and his family (it is a family) have been designing and building their own computers (and ancillary equipment like reflow ovens) and writing their own operating systems and web browsers for some 40 years now. Unfortunately, they live on the outskirts of Mexico City, not Sunnyvale or Boston, so the public accounts of their achievements have been mostly written by vulgar journalists without even rudimentary knowledge of programming or electronics.
And they have maintained their achievements mostly private, perhaps because whenever they've talked about their details publicly, the commentary has mostly been of the form "This isn't possible" and "This is obviously a fraud" from the sorts of ignorant people who make a living installing virus scanners and pirate copies of Windows and thus imagine themselves to be computer experts. (All of this happened entirely in Spanish, except I think for a small amount which happened in Zapotec, which I don't speak; the family counts the authorship of a Zapotec dictionary among their public achievements.) In particular, they've never published the source or even binary code of their operating systems and web browsers, as far as I know.
This changed a few years back when Óscar Toledo G., the son of the founder (Óscar Toledo E.), won the IOCCC with his Nanochess program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Cod... and four more times as well. His obvious achievements put to rest — at least for me — the uncertainty about whether they were underground genius hackers or merely running some kind of con job. Clearly Óscar Toledo G. is a hacker of the first rank, and we can take his word about the abilities of the rest of his family, even if they do not want to publish their code for public criticism.
I look forward to grokking BootOS in fullness and learning the brilliant tricks contained within! Getting a full CLI and minimalist filesystem into a 512-byte floppy-disk boot sector is no small achievement.
It's unfortunate that, unlike the IOCCC entries, BootOS is not open source.
I just watched some of TV interviews with the family and saw the rest of his work, and it's pretty amazing. Check out Invaders in 512 bytes [1][2], or Aardvark game for the Atari 2600 ([3]).
Also seems he has just self-published a book (as of July 27):
Do you would like more details on the inner workings? This program is fully commented in my new book Programming Boot Sector Games and you'll also find a 8086/8088 crash course! Now available from Lulu [4]
This might interest me as someone whose job is the absolute other end of the spectrum, in databases and HLLs. Reason is that I'm concerned with CPU performance and that largely depends on caches (after you've done any algorithmic improvements).
The unqualified claim - may I say lie - that CPU time is cheaper than programmer time was never true and never will be[0] because it depends, it depends on the economics, and a surprising amount of my time has been taken up optimising for speed on multicore modern CPUs. Exactly what other people say isn't worth doing, right up until it is - and it often is.
Optimising for speed often means optimising for caches, and that means optimising for size[1], so I'm going to dive into this guy's stuff.
[0] and I'd ask people to stop repeating it unless the larger context is accounted for.
[1] and cache-friendly access patterns; another issue.
I smile on reading this. I spent well over a decade hand-optimising SQL to do things like shaving a millisecond off a query, or helping (a little) to maintain a proprietary application server in C because it runs so fast we barely needed any servers to support one of the busiest web systems in the world. When you stack up the hardware and electricity costs and general bureaucracy costs of running hundreds of servers day in day out, then these economies do make sense.
As Jeff Atwood famously puts it "performance is a feature", so as any with feature, wether you should invest in it depends on the project and the needs. Sometimes it's worth your time sometimes it's not, only your specs can tell.
I keep telling people that being able to do something in one millisecond is a lot less powerful than being able to do it in one microsecond, especially in a world with Hypothesis and afl-fuzz. There's no such thing as “fast enough.”
I'll be surprised if you learn new things about cache-oblivious algorithm design from BootOS, though.
> Also seems he has just self-published a book (as of July 27):
> Do you would like more details on the inner workings? This program is fully commented in my new book Programming Boot Sector Games and you'll also find a 8086/8088 crash course!
I created one such game [1] a few years ago and had plenty of fun. I'm pretty shocked to see an actual book published specifically about this niche topic. I haven't read it, but I hope it gets some recognition, because IMO toying with 8086 is one of the best ways to get into bare-metal coding.
Yeah, I was all prepared to go into a fairly standard "this isn't an OS, an OS needs to load and execute other programs" before digging into the source, but this totally does that and has a simple shell.
This is ridiculously impressive hacking up there with Woz code.
Makes me think, are they already the first Archivists. Preserving the manufacture of usable computers when the rest of the support infrastructure for modern tech no longer exists. That might just be me projecting my own thinking onto what you've suggested about this family though.
They sounded like a made-up story until I started to look into what you were saying. Why does this family do this? What's the motivation? Pure hacking? Do they run a business in technology and they play around with fun side projects like this?
Why did Mozart write music? What would Mozart have done if he lived in the city of the deaf?
I mean they've written a lot of stuff on their web site about their motivations — they saw that electronics were the wave of the future, they wanted to make Mexico technologically independent and limit the damage of the neoliberal economic model, they wanted to preserve the Zapotec culture from obliteration, and so on — but I think basically it's that they like doing it, in the way Mozart liked music. I'm sympathetic to those other motivations but I don't think they would have been sufficient to maintain their progress in the face of the opposition they've faced from the Mexican government, which continues to adhere to the obsolete "progress is big factories" model mixed with the simply traitorous "progress is installing Microsoft software" model. (They've written about this stuff on their website too.)
As far as I can tell, they make a living by building some industrial control hardware and teaching electronics classes. Maybe a member of the family will comment and offer more detail.
If the OP that posted the link here is the same person that wrote it, as their username and comment history suggests, I think you are probably spot on wrt being motivated by doing it for the sake of doing it.
The HN profile of OP says: “I fight boredom by challenging myself to my limits.”
I read all the articles on their web site (the ones in Spanish and not Zapotec, anyway), the articles in the press about them, and the comments sections of those articles, and I talked with hacker friends of mine who live in Mexico City. I'm interested in minimalist computing systems like Oberon, Plan9, stage0, MesCC, Scheme, Forth, Squeak, OTCC, the LGP-30, and the Familia Toledo's Biyubi system; myself, I've written things like StoneKnifeForth and httpdito, a web server in under 2000 bytes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6908064
But only in my dreams do I approach achievements like Biyubi.
I wondered the same thing, then I did a quick Google search and it turns out they're relatively known in Mexico
They also have a web page: www.biyubi.com
Maybe "underground" was not the best description, but it is the case that much of their software remains unpublished, and so people still debate whether it really exists or not. I think it probably does, because 40 years of a family building extremely optimized software could produce a talent like Óscar Toledo G., while 40 years of running a con job would not.
"The coming war" definitely paints their view of the future as cynical, but as someone who works in robotics for military use it's hard to argue with it...
Hmm, I hadn't thought about that! I wonder if they'd be willing — a lot of their website is under a somewhat vague quasi-open-source license, but they might be chary of "helpful" outsiders who want to "help", as I'm inferring they've had some bad experiences in the past.
Update: it's open source now! As of two hours ago! He also open-sourced bootBASIC, but not fbird, pillman, or invaders. (I had assumed that the lack of any license was intentional, perhaps to keep other people from selling books based on his work, in competition with his own.)
Unfortunately I can't update my top-level comment above.
Since I first saw it posted, I've probably played thousands of games of chess on Nanochess. Impressive achievements, I'd love to learn more of what they've done
> It's unfortunate that, unlike the IOCCC entries, BootOS is not open source.
It's not? What's that asm file in there? It looks like it's the full source code for the image. Or do you mean there's no license file, so it's not free-software/copyright?
Presumably GP means the latter. Without a license file, the author retains all copyright, you can’t reuse or redistribute any of the code. So it’s source available, not open source.
No, it's not "open source" unless it has a license that meets the open source definition [1]. "Source-available" is the right term for this sort of thing.
The obvious common sense definition of "open source" is "I can see the source." This is probably what everyone in this thread automatically thought of, except those to whom the agenda of the Open Source Initiative is of extreme importance and who thus have memorized their definition.
I don't think anyone has memorized it, but everyone who was around when "open source" was first introduced and we debated it to death (compared to "free software") knows that the source being available isn't enough.
So it's not Open Source™, as defined by The Open Source Initiative. I'll still call it open source as there is source in the open that doesn't seem leaked maliciously.
Calling it that could be parsed in a way that would be technically true, but it would be intentionally obtuse, in the same way that a cowboy who rides off on a horse named Tuesday could be described as having "left on Tuesday," or a malware author fond of white fedoras might be described as a "white hat hacker."
"Open source" has been understood to mean "freely redistributable and modifiable" source for a couple of decades now, and if you used it to mean something else without clarifying, you should expect that they will misunderstand you.
Only certain communities. Such as... the general open source community. And maybe even software developers in general. I can definitely see this being misunderstood by end users or others because licensing and the related terminology is just plain confusing, but as long as I can remember it was very clear that there's a difference between shared source, 'available' source, and open source.
The same exact arguments can be made about free software, only worse because colloquially users have traditionally confused it with the term freeware.
Right, one of the strong arguments in favor of the term was that “open source” had no pre-existing meaning to constantly struggle against. Thus my frustration with the persistent confusion, where by “confusion” I mean “con men falsely claiming that their software is open-source in order to free-ride on the goodwill the open-source community has earned through decades of hard work and persistence against impossible odds in order to guarantee basic human rights to everyone in an increasingly computer-mediated world.”
Free Software doesn't mean no cost, it means software where "the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software".
Nicely demonstrating that just as "open source" is open to multiple interpretations, so is "free software". Within certain communities, there are widely-accepted definitions (from OSI, FSF, Debian, etc) but not everyone automatically understands the terms according to these definitions.
> Nicely demonstrating that just as "open source" is open to multiple interpretations, so is "free software".
Not really, no. The FSF definition of 'free software' is accepted by the technical community as the definition of the term. Same goes for the OSI's definition of Open Source.
> not everyone automatically understands the terms according to these definitions
Not really, no. No-one knowledgeable about these topics is going to insist upon non-standard definitions of the terms. Marketing drones may abuse the terms, and ignorant people don't know any better than to be imprecise, but they are not the same thing as what you are suggesting.
Debian do not make up their own definitions. They explicitly mention both the FSF and OSI in their article on licensing. They certainly have their own ideas on intellectual property (their famous objections to Mozilla's rules about the Firefox trademark), but I don't see them redefining any terms. They are careful to use Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) when referring to their own rules. [0]
Aside: it can be helpful to capitalise to emphasise that you mean the proper definitions of the terms, e.g. The software is neither Free Software nor Open Source. Clunky, sure enough, but people do occasionally make up their own definitions and run with them, often enough that it's a problem for clear communication.
I'm not really sure why. Making up your own personal definitions for terms already in common parlance, is usually treated as an exercise in obtuse silliness, for obvious reasons.
Usually, no exception is made for when an accepted technical term is misused in common parlance, e.g. using 'theory' for any explanation that pops into your head, or referring to an automatic rifle as a 'machine gun'. In those instances we separate the popular use of the term from the technical one, and still insist on correct terminology in technical circles.
> Nicely demonstrating that just as "open source" is open to multiple interpretations, so is "free software". Within certain communities, there are widely-accepted definitions (from OSI, FSF, Debian, etc) but not everyone automatically understands the terms according to these definitions.
At least for "free", it (used to be?) very common to add an "as in" after, like "free as in beer" (you don't have to pay) or "free as in speech" (you can do what you want with it).
Yes, it's true that some people misunderstand them, but it's a good thing that these terms have clear and widely understood meanings (compared to something completely vague like, say, "agile") and so we should promote correct usage rather than letting them drift.
Who benefits from watering them down? People who want to take advantage of confusion to release their software under weaker licenses while taking advantage of the "open source" or "free software" names.
Those three definitions are so similar that when they disagree it's usually because someone is misinterpreting something. The key disagreements between Debian and the FSF are about invariant sections in documentation and the mere existence of Debian’s non-free category, which it explicitly doesn't claim is free software.
Where are these people coming from? We were perfectly clear when we invented the term "open source" that we meant "free software", to the point of adapting the Debian Free Software Guidelines into the explicit and detailed Open Source Definition, and we've been using the term consistently for over 20 years. Where is the roach nest that keeps sending forth these would-be free-riders on the goodwill attached to the term "open source", who keep trying to falsely pass off their proprietary crud as "open source", and how can we exterminate them?
(Not, of course, BootOS; it never claims to be open-source.)
> Where are these people coming from? We were perfectly clear when we invented the term "open source" that we meant "free software", to the point of adapting the Debian Free Software Guidelines into the explicit and detailed Open Source Definition, and we've been using the term consistently for over 20 years.
Well, language is open, and confusing terminology will cause misunderstandings. Besides, there is not one definition of open source, and the most common definition has 10 criteria. You're not exactly doing anyone a service by calling someone who is not aware of all this background and understandably uses a rational interpretation of "open source" a roach. In fact, you come across as a douchebag.
(Now, I agree that intentionally abusing the term is reprehensible, but that does not seem to be the case here)
Whatever problems you may have with my ethnicity hardly seem relevant here! We're talking about con men falsely claiming that their software is open-source in order to free-ride on the goodwill the open-source community has earned through decades of hard work and persistence against impossible odds in order to guarantee basic human rights to everyone in an increasingly computer-mediated world. If it takes douchebags to show the falsity of their false claims, then let's have more douchebags! (But actually I think people of any ethnicity are equally capable of standing up for what is right; it doesn't have to be a douchebag like me.)
I don't know why you think the error was unintentional in this case. The poster in question wrote, "You mean open source yes, free software no." They are implying that they not only have knowledge of the nuances of the definitions in question, but are so certain of it that they correct other people for misusing the terms — they aren't just guessing. Presumably such a person will at least have read the introductory paragraph on the Wikipedia page for "Open-source software"!
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying the mistake is understandable, and that you can correct someone in a polite way. Probably everyone has used terminology the wrong way, and I don't think overreacting helps your case in any way.
(I don't understand your remarks about ethnicity. As far as I know 'douchebag' is not a racial slur.)
I assume it's mostly due to misunderstanding. It's been a long time since the open source definition was adopted and we're seeing more and more people now who don't know the history.
People who have been using a term their whole lives might not have any idea where it came from, or that it even has an official definition.
But where does the misunderstanding come from? Where are they getting the fraudster definition from? Do they see threads like this and think “I should be like that guy who has all those people yelling at him that he's wrong,” or is there some reservoir of memetic infection out there where this kind of thing goes unchallenged?
It's right there in the words of the term - it's not an unreasonable guess to think that 'open source' just means that the source code is 'open' in the sense of 'available', especially since proprietary software doesn't normally provide source code.
Compound this by the fact that many people are jumping into this field where English is not their first (or even second) language.
Listen, UNAM is one of Latin America's greatest universities, and Mexico City is highly industrialized, but Mexico City is like Milwaukee or Houston or Albuquerque or Buenos Aires, not like Sunnyvale or Boston or Singapore or Shenzhen. If you're a hacker in Mexico City, you're gonna be pretty isolated by comparison to a hacker in a tech hub, and you're swimming against the tide of a corrupt and technically incompetent government in the same way you would be in Houston, a way that you won't be in Sunnyvale or Boston.
I'm well aware that people in Mexico City aren't illiterate paupers. That's not what I was saying, man. But you're going to have a hell of a time launching a new kind of laptop in Mexico City, and that's what they were trying to do.
Oscar Toledo is very talented to write minimal code, but it does mean either his entire family is a society of wizards or they can build a computer or develop browsers, these "achievements" are urban legends without any proof.
> Unfortunately, they live on the outskirts of Mexico City, not Sunnyvale or Boston, so the public accounts of their achievements have been mostly written by vulgar journalists without even rudimentary knowledge of programming or electronics.
It would be a valid reason in '80s
One of the first web browsers in the 90s was written by one dude in four days, with the whole GUI. A browser doesn't necessarily mean CSS and JS.
Sometime in the past couple months, there was a link on HN to a project also by one dude, who's implementing a CPU on breadboards, with wires. (Can probably be found by the score filter from the ‘undocumented features’ of HN: the post got >2000 points.)
Also, implementing browsers (or operating systems, or cpus) isn't about needing to write amounts of code that would take a long time write - it's about whether you know the subject area and do you already have a plan/architecture in your head that you are going to create.
All of that sounds very interesting, but as edgarvm points out, it's not exactly evidence. Reads more like a product brochure than a research paper detailing how their claims are possible.
Well, if they didn't build their own computers, they certainly went to a lot of trouble to fake up photos of the family members doing electronic prototypes. And I think some of those photos may be older than PhotoShop, so faking them would have been more work than just building a home computer, though validating the photos’ apparent age might require digging up 1980s Mexican computer hobbyist magazines. (There's a convenient list of computer-magazine articles stretching back to 1981 on the Biyubi website; if you're in Mexico, maybe you could try to find them in a library or a used bookstore.)
Also they offer a course in building your own electronics that you can sign up for if you go to their workshop. I can't go to Mexico so I haven't signed up for it; it's at least theoretically possible that the course doesn't really exist and will be canceled if you do sign up for it. But if that doesn't happen you can go there and take the course and see the G11V3 and presumably Fénix and Biyubi in person. I've seen comments in news-website comment threads from people who claim to have done so and claim that it's real, and no comments from people who claim to have done so and then been rejected, so it seems most likely that the course is for real.
Together with Óscar Toledo G.’s amply demonstrated skills at programming under extreme resource constraints, skills which require a great deal of practice to acquire, I think the evidence strongly favors the hypothesis that Fénix, Biyubi, the G11V3, the electronics courses, and the rest of it is real, if maybe a bit oversold.
Many people go to a lot of trouble to perpetrate fraud, look at that guy claiming to have invented bitcoin for example. That is not to say that I believe this site to be fraudulent.
I could not find any information on a course available, could you point me in the right direction? It is a bit odd to me that none of their products are available for purchase from their website (I saw the $99 computer with minimum order of 1000 units but when clicking through I was redirected back to the home page).
Yeah, ......._ (what a strange nickname!), they might have a good-faith belief that the software is bug-free and without security holes, but such a belief is likely mistaken. It's not absolutely guaranteed to be mistaken — earlier in the thread, someone compared BootOS to some Woz code, and as far as I know nobody has ever found a bug in Woz's Apple Integer BASIC — but it's very likely to be mistaken.
And they have maintained their achievements mostly private, perhaps because whenever they've talked about their details publicly, the commentary has mostly been of the form "This isn't possible" and "This is obviously a fraud" from the sorts of ignorant people who make a living installing virus scanners and pirate copies of Windows and thus imagine themselves to be computer experts. (All of this happened entirely in Spanish, except I think for a small amount which happened in Zapotec, which I don't speak; the family counts the authorship of a Zapotec dictionary among their public achievements.) In particular, they've never published the source or even binary code of their operating systems and web browsers, as far as I know.
This changed a few years back when Óscar Toledo G., the son of the founder (Óscar Toledo E.), won the IOCCC with his Nanochess program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Cod... and four more times as well. His obvious achievements put to rest — at least for me — the uncertainty about whether they were underground genius hackers or merely running some kind of con job. Clearly Óscar Toledo G. is a hacker of the first rank, and we can take his word about the abilities of the rest of his family, even if they do not want to publish their code for public criticism.
I look forward to grokking BootOS in fullness and learning the brilliant tricks contained within! Getting a full CLI and minimalist filesystem into a 512-byte floppy-disk boot sector is no small achievement.
It's unfortunate that, unlike the IOCCC entries, BootOS is not open source.