As far as desktop microcomputers for mere mortals went in the first half of the 1980s, there was a sharp distinction between home computers such as the many 8-bit machines we regularly see here, and what you might call professional computers such as a CP/M word-processor or the earliest IBM PCs. These were conservative machines, boring even, with command line interfaces and mostly text-mode software.
When the middle of the decade saw the arrival of mass-market machines such as the Macintosh or the Amiga with their beautiful GUIs, a PC with DOS couldn’t yet compete. [Jggonz] then is over four decades late with the beautiful os8088, a fully-functional OS for 8088 IBM PCs and clones, with a very slick Mac-style GUI.
os8088 is a single-floppy OS that provides preemptive multitasking and fully loadable software alongside that GUI, unlike other similar projects we’ve seen it’s not an all-in-one compiled application that just looks like an OS. There’s a second floppy with a suite of software that would have been seriously impressive back in the day, with games, graphics, and demos. It’s a shame that this thing appeared in 2026 when there is little need of it.
You can try it for yourself either on real hardware, your own emulator, or even in an in-browser emulator. Sadly it’s not OS enough to fulfill the requirements for a Daily Drivers test drive, but it’s definitely fun to play with. Bonus, if you run it on a Book8088.
Is it possible to stop covering vide-coded OS please? It’s getting tired.
The main purpose for playing/coding for retro machines is to learn to work/play with constraints and to learn old machines idiosyncrasies. A running app is merely a side effect/bonus.
Vibe coding with retrocomputer defeats this purpose and is totally missing the point.
The destination is not the goal, it’s the journey
“Essentially all of the code, and these docs, were produced by coding agents (Claude Code and Codex)”
How do we even know it actually works or does what it says, since the documentation is done by AI as well? Has anyone actually reviewed it, or are they (or Claude) just saying they did?
I read a bit of the code, having done quite a bit of assembly for the 286 and always curious, I can tell you the comments are funny. Maybe there is a “vocabulary” somewhere to understand the concepts. They are kind of wordy on the wrong way. I saw just today a video by action retro where he plays with claude too and with some code it generated, also an os… kind of coincidence.
The trouble with AI is that it’s prone to making “Potemkin Village” code and comments. It’s something that looks the part and acts the part, but only from a certain angle and seen from a distance, as it is reported inaccurately to audiences who don’t know better.
Who checked it, or did they just read whatever Claude claims and reported it to us verbatim?
Making articles about vibe coded projects carries the responsibility that the authors of the project didn’t bother to take.
seconded. for me, it is off-putting because it blurs the line between waking and sleep. this is a dream of an OS…it has neither user nor developer. i know in fact it is an ad revenue generator but i don’t hardly see that aspect, all i see is the wisp of nothing. a mirage.
i think as a counter-proposal, instead of distributing slop or glossing slop or advertising slop or whatever it is we do with slop today. we should share the prompts. imagine if this project was just a couple page fulls of prompts and nothing else, no responses, no code, no product, no video.
then it would be what it is. then it would be something.
Then in probably wouldn’t replicate, because pressing the “make it” button all over again would result in subtly different responses from the LLM. The fact that it did do something the first time over is rather lucky, or buggy as it were.
I dunno, on this one it sort of works. This is a kind of “what if” scenario: using all the knowledge we have gained since the 5150 came out, what could have been, now that we know what we know?
LLMs are pretty good at taking a large set of knowledge and extracting useful information. The fact that Claude was able to build this, when no human had done so before (remember, the target machine is over 40 years old at this point) maybe points to a gap in the knowledge a single human contains. Or at least points to a gap in the human(s) who would like to build this type of system.
In other words, those who potentially had the knowledge to do this…didn’t. They had 40 years to do so, and they didn’t.
The person who wanted to do this didn’t have the knowledge and/or skill set. Is that person supposed to just wistfully daydream about the project, ne’er to behold it in the flesh? No, they should (and did) use the tools available to them to bring the project to fruition.
And I think the results are pretty interesting.
Great work! I wonder if this would run on an Atari Portfolio?