I have a sort of constellation of projects that fit together into an overarching project, and I'd love to have some other people interested or even collaborating on it.
The goals are:
- Make computers that easier to understand and use (than current systems.)
- Make large flying machines to enable cheap and efficient mass transport of people and materials. (Like huge, kilometer-scale kite/blimps.)
- Collect and recycle the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (and the other ocean gyres.)
An overview of the general strategy: Start with toys, both computers and the flying machines. Grow a community of folks to do distributed research and manufacturing. Collect and amass enough subunits (the flying machines are cellular) to build a machine large enough to reach the GPGP and return with some trash. Recycle the trash into raw materials (possibly using molten salt oxidation) to make more machines to collect more trash to make more raw materials, and so on...
There are a lot of details, obviously, but that's the gist of it. It probably sounds crazy but I'm seriously, I think it's doable, worthwhile, and fun. If you're interested send me an email (my username is sforman and the server is hushmail.com.)
> Make computers that easier to understand
This piqued my interest. I've talked with some older people who had computers in their home during childhood and they told me about tinkering with them and so on. Those were of course much simpler machined than we have today, and I ended up feeling like they had a more intimate relationship with the computer than their younger counterparts. How are you planning to accomplish that?
That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.
> How are you planning to accomplish that?
Thanks for asking. Two major ways: on the hardware side I want to use small and simple systems. The raspberry pi is a little more complex than what I want. On the software side I have a simple GUI and macro language that is easy to learn and much much simpler and more elegant than current conventional UIs.
> On the hardware side I want to use small and simple systems
If you'd like to build a fully understandable computer, you might be interested in concatenative languages like Forth, Factor, and colorForth. These use a much simpler and more understandable, typically stack-based computational model that run on microcontrollers like STM32. You can create more complex words by composing together simple assembly-language-like atoms and building higher and higher layers of abstraction.
- https://concatenative.org/wiki/view/Factor/FAQ/Why%3F
- Motivation section from: https://bernd-paysan.de/why-forth.html
> On the software side I have a simple GUI and macro language that is easy to learn and much much simpler and more elegant than current conventional UIs.
A good starting point or source of inspiration might be the Smalltalk and Lisp Machines from the past.
- Introduction to the Smalltalk Programming Language: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1241904/Introduction-to...
- How Do I Master The Art of Smalltalk? https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-master-the-art-of-Smalltalk?s...
- Live Objects in Smalltalk Pharo: https://www.quora.com/What-is-this-live-objects-in-Smalltalk...
- Smalltalk Principles: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk....
You might also be interested in this blog from a guy who is trying to build his own OS from scratch and run it on an FPGA: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55 Some of his earlier writings about Symbolics Open Genera and Lisp machines are also quite interesting and might be a good source of ideas and principles: http://www.loper-os.org/?cat=8&paged=5