About six months ago, during one of my long runs, I had a wild idea: what if I built an OS disk image that booted straight into EndBASIC, bundled it with a Raspberry Pi, a display, a custom 3D-printed case, and made a tiny, self-contained retro BASIC computer? Fast-forward to today and such an idea exists in the form of “the EndBOX prototype”! This article isn’t the product announcement though—that’s elsewhere. What I want to do here is look back at the Blog System/5 articles I’ve...| Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)
Remember when turning a computer on meant instantly jumping into code? No bloat, no distractions—just you and a prompt? That’s the experience I’ve been working to bring back with the EndBOX: a small, resilient, nostalgia-packed, all-screen computer that boots straight into the retro-inspired EndBASIC environment you already know. And today, six months after its inception, I’m excited to formally show you the first working prototypes—though they are still rough and need refinement. L...| EndBASIC
If you have been following the development of EndBASIC, you know its console can display both text and graphics at once. What you may not know is that, now, it can also achieve this feat on the NetBSD console without using X11 at all. This is done by directly rendering to the wsdisplay framebuffer, and this article presents a crash course on direct graphics and keyboard access via NetBSD’s wscons framework.| Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)
After a little over 11 years, it’s time for a much longed change: I’m leaving Google and I’m joining Microsoft as a Principal Software Engineer for Azure. These job changes are effective as of this week, but my family and I already moved from New York City to Redmond, WA about three weeks ago. Read on for a recap on my tenure at Google, the whys behind my departure, and how I ended up choosing the position in Microsoft Azure after mulling over offers from Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft.| Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)
