I am excited to announce a new project I'm going to be starting to be starting this weekend!

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to build you're computer's entire software stack from scratch? If so, I encourage you to check out the new series I'm going to be starting called Primitive Computing.

Primitive Computing is going to be a live-coding project where we start with just an assembler and try to boostrap an entire computer operating system. We'll start by getting the machine to boot, then have some fun with small boot sector programs. The goal from there will be to bootstrap a self-hosted operating environment. This will necessarily require keeping things small. Since assembly language is tedious, we'll design and implement a slightly higher level language pretty early on. Using this, we'll build richer operating system constructs and some simple applications such as a text editor.

The stream will go live at 8:00 PM PST on Sunday, January 17th. The stream will be available here, or you can watch the embedded video below.

While building a whole computing environment from scratch is a daunting task, I'm looking forward to seeing where this adventure goes. One passtime of mine is pondering what would happen if we built a new OS, programming language, application API, and everything else starting from scratch using what we've learned over the last several decades of computing. This is a lot to take on, but I think however far we get we will learn something.

I look forward to seeing you on Sunday!