In the late 1980s, AMD's AM29000 family was a serious contender in high-performance RISC silicon. ARM was still confined to a British educational machine, the 68000 line was dominant and the x86's future was not guaranteed. Oscar Toledo G. and his father chose the AM29000 to build a high-performance home computer.
Toledo then wrote an operating system for it in AM29000 assembly. It included a graphical user interface, a C compiler and a web browser that was current for the late 1990s. Among the feats he describes is porting C code into AM29000 machine code by hand.
The story is told in two parts. The first covers the computer and the early software, the second the C compiler and the web browser. An in-browser emulator lets readers run the system themselves.
Toledo is the same author who previously built a Transputer emulator for the browser, covered by Hackaday in April 2025.
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