If you only want to please yourself, you can dispense with all that legacy stuff. You can stay busy and enjoy yourself in your own world.
Some of the hobby OS listed here look like they might be standalone worlds:
In Elif Batuman's 2017 novel The Idiot, about a naive Harvard student, her not-really-a-boyfriend Ivan, a math student, enthuses to her about Emacs. The book is set in 1995.
I enjoyed the book. It got good reviews and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Explanation of Sudoku in APL. Lots of information, absolutely no clutter. Entire page is nothing but text in a single precise sans-serif typewriter font, the same size and strength for everything: headings, explanation, code, and tables. Typewriter font includes mathematical symbols.
Particles accelerating in a cyclotron at sufficiently high energy reach relativistic speeds. You have to account for their relativistic mass increase to get the cyclotron to work. Figuring this out was a big issue in cyclotron design in the 1930s. The remedy is to strengthen the magnetic field near the outer edge of the cyclotron where particles move fastest, by adding coils there
to carry more current. I don't recall what the energy is where this becomes necessary - it is certainly needed at tens of MeV.
Plutonium was first synthesized in a cyclotron by Lawrence's group at Berkeley.
I don't know what energy they used so I don't know if they needed the extra coils, but they did know of the effect and must have considered it.
Also, U235 was separated at Oak Ridge using machines called Calutrons invented by Lawrence that might have encountered the same problem -- at least they must have considered it.
I haven't seen it mentioned here or in the obituaries, but Peter started the RISKS Digest in 1985 partly in response to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, "Star Wars") which proposed a space-based anti-ballistic missile system run autonomously by computers [1].
Another response was the formation of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibilty (CPSR) [2]. Peter was an early member, and many early RISKS submissions were by CPSR members.
Peter's letter to readers about the creation of RISKS in Issue #1.01 [3] mentions SDI and CPSR (it's long, scroll down)
ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. "Francis ... on 14 January 2025 ... approved this Note and ordered its publication."
This is a remarkable, very unusual project. It looks well thought out and is surprisingly complete -- it even includes an end-to-end ML training and sampling program as an example!
Is there a writeup somewhere that explains more about the motivation and history for this project?
This is entirely in keeping with the Star Trek tradition. It had a multiracial cast and female officers in 1966, when that was quite unusual in a TV show.
https://josephoswald.nfshost.com/circuit-sim/woz-machine-hw-...