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.
> 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