I'm interested in ancient UNIX and 16-bit x86 assembly language. When I was growing up in the 80s, these were the mysterious systems that captured my imagination but I lacked the means to explore.

The first edition of Andy Tanenbaum's textbook OSDI says that a system of about the complexity of Version 7 UNIX is about the limit that one person can fully understand.

I like this idea. Now that I have the means, I'm indulging my curiosity with a kind of historical reenactment. I'm building a nice library of old UNIX books and Intel manuals. I have a MINIX 1.5 installation running on a 80286 with 2MB of RAM emulated by PCem, and an old Thinkpad X23 battlestation running XP where I can run A86/D86 and DOS DEBUG in an NTVDM window.

I believe in shrinking the practice space.