There have been a few projects in the past that have attempted to build complete computing systems (OS, basic services/apps, development environment, sometimes even hardware) with a focus on comprehensibility — a single individual should be able to understand how the whole system works is stated explicitly as a goal. For me instantly Alan Kay's VPRI's STEPS project comes to mind, as well as Niklaus Wirth's Oberon Project. What other systems/project like that do you know or what should also be considered as a similar project, even if the stated goals might be different?

Btw sounds like a #thinking-together post :)

@opeispo Hmm… was thinking that too, but then decided that I'm basically sharing and asking for links. Well, now it's here; let's see how it goes.

I guess Mu from @Kartik Agaram is built around the same idea.

I like this one from a low level hardware point of view: (I have built some of this one myself) And this one: https://www.nand2tetris.org/ But neither of these go as far as making an OS.

@Robert Butler's https://github.com/grokthis/ucisc

Smalltalk, as discussed by Dan Ingalls: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.html. That's not how Smalltalk turned out to be used, but the idea was there.

Seems like https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/urbit-os/ fits that description too.

Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2020/xv6.html Plan9 is actually quite self-contained and easy to understand. DreamOS (scheme all the way down) http://web.archive.org/web/20120815232133/http://www.stripedgazelle.org/joey/dreamos.html ArmPit Scheme for ARM-based MCU http://armpit.sourceforge.net MiniOS https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.09792

I just came across somebody who seems to have built lots of disjoint pieces that go into a computing stack: http://litcave.rudi.ir And it reminded me that my friend Kragen Sitaker is the same way: http://canonical.org/~kragen. His website rewards slow browsing.