Thanks to Twitter/X, I got my hands on a DEC VT510 terminal in superb condition but without a keyboard. To achieve a 100% Digital Equipment Corporation look, I bought a DEC PC keyboard, since the VT510 accepts any keyboard with a mini-DIN connector. Since FUZIX is in the lineage of 1970s UNIXes, it would make sense to display the FUZIX virtual terminal using a physical terminal. The VT510 offers two serial connectors, male and female, and is capable of serial connections up to 115000 baud. This…

A functional FUZIX system fits into the PICO’s FLASH memory. However, the port provides for the use of a file system on an SD card from the start. FUZIX can only manage 32MB partitions, but that’s a huge amount of disk space for such a frugal system.

The idea behind FUZIX is to recreate an old-school UNIX that can run on 8-bit (Z80, 6502, 6809) or 16-bit (68000) architectures and provide them with a complete operating system: process management, files, input/output, etc. It is also a way to go back to the origins of UNIX with a frugality and efficiency required by the low power of the target hardware platforms.

Perhaps influenced by industrial mandatory practices, I wanted to add an emergency button to my home server in order to shut it down fast. For example in case of power shortage, I’d like to trigger a clean shutdown before the UPS runs out of power and without requiring a screen or keyboard attached. Therefore I bought an USB “emergency” button.

That was the easiest part. The button acts as a single key keyboard emitting…

Most of my VirtualBox virtual machines are automatically created using Vagrant scripts. So when I came across a repository a few months ago that offers an easy and automatic Mac OS X installation shell script, my curiosity was piqued.