!Hardware glue layer --- agk's diary 3 July 2027 --- from HP 200LX (1994) with HP Memo editor (1993) in living room after long hot sunny day --- I used my hacking time this week on the operating systems and user software for my "lateral thinking with salvaged tech" project. I described it here before. I'm making a set of usb drives (or sd cards, cf cards, or boot CDs) to make junk computers into fun, useful, calm, daily-driver things for children and non-technical adults. Each livesystem-on-a-removable-medium has a single function for focused use. Everything possible is write-protected or ROM, so it's hard to break and never needs an administrator. Each underlying host machine is general-purpose, but the livesystems aren't. Each system boots in under a second on 20 yr-old low-end laptops or weird applian- ces that happen to have a computer in there.Changing functions is as easy (and as intentional) as putting in a different videotape or Nintendo ROM cartridge. Ideally, the systems won't be picky about hardware and happily boot on whatever you got so long as it's x86 with a BIOS. But I only test on a 2008 ThinkPad X61 til I get the three key prototypes built. I'll describe the prototypes, but first, Solderpunk says I'm taking a UNIX software metaphor to hard- ware. I'm making cheap, minimal "glue layers" to stick together things that already exist in an embarrasment of plenty, but sit idle, abandoned, or severely underutilized. Prefiguratively, I'm saying, "There's more than enough computer for everyone. Manufacturing can stop. We can live without hyperscale data centers, 5G, always-on broadband internet, and DDR5 RAM." My project doesn't require expensive restorations of vintage showpieces. More, "What can you stick to- gether that you already have (or can get for under 20 bucks, or at least under 50), to yield something surprisingly, delightfully dependable, fun, useful?" And what can you remove from the host machine to simplify it? Two prototype systems are offline-only by design--no network capabilities, no way to add any. I wrote about the first here before. It's designed for children, with some the finest edutainment titles ever made. I'm using Paul Blair's 1.44 M FUZOMA floppy burned to USB. I found that 5 yr-olds, 9 yr-olds, and 20 yr-olds think it's awesome, and want to compose midi music, solve math problems, paint, learn to read, solve mazes, write, touch-type while chased by monsters, and play chess with it. The system's FreeDOS-based, with kidsmenu and a mix of DOS games and games running in a C64 emulator for DOS. The USB flash drive version I use boots with Unetbootin. My daughter and I've been exploring other cool DOS software, launched from my bespoke batch file menu/picker in a DOSBox emulator, but I haven't started to figure out how to modify Paul Blair's disk images yet. The second system's for distraction-free writing of anything from class assignments to novels. I started with usb-dos by journalist Liam Proven of The Register. It's SvarDOS, the graphical DOSShell menu from PC DOS 2000, and writing tools. It includes SF author Robert Sawyer's WordStar 7 system with helper programs and manuals, as well as other word process- ors, editors, outliners, and a spreadsheet. I wrote usb-dos to a flash drive with Windows-only flashing tool Rufus (I think I failed to get a bootable system from dd or unetbootin). What makes usb-dos easy to customize and useful is what makes it breakable. Unlike FUZOMA, if you mount the flash drive as mass storage, the whole filesystem is right there, readable and writeable. That makes it easy for writers to transfer their files instead of just writing and printing. I reorganized the DOSShell menus, added an alternate simple menu for new or easily-overwhelmed users, reorganized the filesystem and changed the WordStar and Protext configs accordingly, consolidated Robert Sawyer's WordStar manual pdfs in one easily discover- able folder and deduplicated them, and removed/added software (added vi and toys for writing breaks). When I installed ambpack to pack the new help system I designed into the amb (ancient machine book) format svardos uses, it displayed an error which led me to what I guess was a missing dependency. Once installed and called, it wrecked my filesystem, especially my autoexec.bat, utilities directory, and wordstar and protext directories. I reflashed the disk image, then copied over my backup. When I'm done tinkering, I need a way to make every- thing read-only except the docs directory (and maybe a directory for program-generated files that should survive reboots), like FUZOMA, so if the system runn- ing in RAM gets stupid, a reboot'll fix it. I'll put disk images of FUZOMA and my usb-dos fork in my withered tech directory next week before I go hiking with dad. The other livesystems-on-removable-media are for networked computers. I plan to strip wifi/bt inter- faces from the host computers and only support ethernet or the network interface included with the livesystem boot device. Faster boot time, less for a user to figure out that way. The "dumb terminal" prototype should boot, auto- login, bring up a network interface, and connect to a local BBS in about a second, then wait for the user's remote system password. A clever user could reconfigure it to connect to a server with kermit or minicom instead. I'm deferring the hardware/network side of things til I have a fast-enough-booting prototype. For now I'm using it over Ethernet with TCP/IP, but curious about serial over reticulum network via RS-232, raw ethernet frame, or LoRa transport. That's all in the future. After 20 years using laptop and server Unix things, they're still so much harder for me to understand than DOS things! In the present, I can't get an Alpine Linux USB livesystem to boot dependably, AntiX and FuguIta USB livesystems boot way too slow (and AntiX stopped booting after a system update). I'm waiting on a blank CD to burn Tiny Core Linux to becuse WalMart stopped selling CD-Rs in the store, but I spent several hours getting my head wrapped around Tiny Core's idiosyncratic design. All four are still in the running, with hopes I can disable lots of services and hack the kernel into something befitting an instabooting embedded dumb terminal appliance. Alternatively, I may try mTCP or serial communications on a DOS livesystem. A web browsing livesystem would be useful, possibly modified from TAILS, possibly something more constrained built on plan9 or DOS. It would aid development and administration of the other systems if it could mount USBs and read/write to removable media. After the edutainment, word processor, and tty systems are usable, I'll think about it. Most people already have a web browser, so not priority. Two more possible toys: A Plan9 drawterm-on-a-stick and a retrogaming system-on-a-stick. I leave them as exercises for the reader. I'm currently using low-profile 4GB USB 2.0 drives. They work fine, and won't get snapped off by a kid. Distracted writers and bored kids I've shared proto- types with "get it," but when I showed Evy what I've been working on, she was confused. "What's a DOS? Why are you doing this? Why do you want to use such old programs?" To her it looks like an art project, and in a way it is! The focus, child-safety, low/no cost, conservation ethic, and well-engineered, resource-efficient software didn't scratch her itch. I couldn't explain it in a way that hit. "I didn't understand most of what you just said." But she liked playing the touch-typing game BabyType on FUZOMA and my fork of USB-DOS. My old friend Carter didn't quite get it either. "You're trying to bring back the PC and BBS era. That era was legit fun," he said. "But my teen son doesn't want to drive circles around the McDonalds or walk around the mall trying to look cool to girls like I did. He already has a smartphone and all the habits it brings. I don't think a weird computer from the trash can fix that." Yeah, but neither Carter nor his son have tried it. Anyway, I'm having fun. So I'm going to keep going. Maybe my daughter will get to grow up with a PC, a local-only LoRa BBS her friends use to pass notes and play door games, a landline, CDs, a good non-NPR community radio station (WSKV), a library card, and a bicycle. Got to build a world if you want to live in it.