About

I’m Tony. I live in the Pacific Northwest, lead an IT and cybersecurity team for a living, am a dad the rest of the time, and spend the hours that are left building things for computers that most people consider retired.

The IT and security background is relevant because a lot of this project is about trust and secure design: getting old machines onto modern networks in a way that isn’t a liability. The vintage computing part is harder to explain. These computers were tools from a more civilized time. I like how direct they are. I like how honest they are. Every byte does what the documentation says, every register is a real register, every interrupt is a real interrupt. Nothing is hiding behind an opaque kernel or a remote service. The nostalgia matters, but the straightforwardness is what makes this one of my favorite hobbies.

Barely Booting started with a question: could I turn my 286 into a daily driver? Not as a novelty or a retro prop, as an actual machine I could send email from, chat with friends on, and browse the web with. The honest answer is “no, not without building a lot of new stuff.” So that’s what this is. Me building the new stuff.

The main project is NetISA, an ISA expansion card that’s supposed to give pre-Pentium PCs a working path to the modern internet. WiFi and TLS 1.3 via an ESP32-S3, bridged to the ISA bus by a CPLD. On top of that I’ve built a DOS software stack: Cathode (a text-mode web browser, sort of), Discord v2 for DOS, and a Claude AI client. Separately, TAKEOVER is an AI takeover simulator for DOS that has nothing to do with networking. I fell down a demoscene rabbit hole and this is what came out.

The hardware isn’t built yet. The software works in DOSBox-X. Whether any of this will actually work on real iron is still very much an open question, and honestly that’s part of the fun. I’m documenting the whole thing because building in public is better than building alone, and because if it does work, I want anyone to be able to build one.

Everything is open source. Schematics, firmware, CPLD logic, DOS code, all of it. Including the mistakes.

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