Motivation for Making LoseThos

I'll describe my motivation for making LoseThos indirectly.

1986:

I had a book called, "Mapping the Commodore 64," when I was a teenager and it 
told what every location did.  I hooked-up Radio Shack photo-transistors to my 
paddle-port and relays to another port.  I floated aluminum foil in our pool, 
bounced infrared-light off of it and could detect waves.

On the Commodore, you made sounds with waveforms.

1984:

I hated the arcade game, Dragon's Lair, the first laserdisc game, because it 
played a movie, like a choose-you-own adventure book, instead of calculating 
images.  A programmer, alone, can make a game, but can't compete with teams 
including artists and sound studios.  An artist can't make a game.

1994:

I made a wire-wrapped ISA data acquisition A-to-D/D-to-A card for my PC when I 
was in college and made an inductance measuring device by measuring Bode plots.

1997:

I made a 3-axis milling machine by hand with stepper motors and a Dremel tool.  
I tried extruding playdough.  I did a CAD/CAM software package.  I made a 
stepper-motor-driving circuit with a microcontroller that communicated to a PC 
over a RS232 serial line.

2000:

I made a serial EEPROM programming device connected to a PC parallel port that 
worked fine up-until Windows XP came along and banned direct access to I/O 
ports.


2003:

I decided to make a PC operating system, 64-bit, with full access to everything 
to be a joy for programmers who like tinkering.  I thought, "Why not a souped-up 
Commodore 64, that does everything we did before networking?"

I heard a quote, "Is your dissertation on physics or Linux?"

The LoseThos Constitution describes what LoseThos is about and why it's 
different.



* "Radio Shack" is a trademark of the Tandy Corporation.
* "Commodore 64" was a trademark of Commodore Business Machines.
* "Linux" is probably a trademark owned by Linus Torvalds.
* "Dragon's Lair" was a trademark of Cinematronics.
* "Dremel" is a trademark of the Robert Bosch Tool Corporation.
* "Windows" is a trademark of MicroSoft Corp.