The People's Permacomputer Project

Category: Housekeeping

  • Project Update October 2026

    Project Update October 2026

    The current points of focus in the project are:

    • Coming up with a text editor you can type into a Tiny BASIC interpreter by hand. Something around 200 to 300 lines of code, and allows, say, a couple of pages of text of free RAM, for the user to do serious work within. Perhaps something in excess of 2K free RAM.
    • The current hardware that the project imagines it will target are:
      1. The Arduino mega, with its 8K total SRAM. This board loads Stefan’s BASIC with ~6.5K free RAM. With a rough yardstick of 80×25 characters being ~ 2K, the text editor must come in at around ~ 4.5K. This configuration is ‘headless’, in the sense that you must communicate with the mega via serial monitor. Please see this post for a text editor in BASIC that may serve as inspiration for a modern clone or recreation.
      2. The LILYGO TTGO VGA32, with configurations of Stefan’s BASIC ranging from 32K user program memory space to an upper limit of 64K. With VGA output capabilities, this is a good “all-in-one” solution to acquiring BASIC. PS2 keyboard required.
      3. A hypothetical implementation of BASIC that the project calls ‘idiomatic BASIC’, which is designed to facilitate a maximum portability of the above mentioned text editor to other, perhaps unintended flavours of BASIC. This may largely look like the approach taken by David Ahl in BASIC Computer Games.
  • Introduction

    Introduction

    The original purpose of this project was to design and then construct computers that would be able to survive a societal collapse.

    After working on the project, it became apparent that the point of the project should not be to imagine a hypothetical future, but to engage practically with the problems of the present.

    The entire computing stack of the modern era is large, confusing, and unsafe. People would rather excuse themselves from having to learn about it. Who can blame them?

    The first aim of the project is to be exceedingly cost effective: “if the oppressed cannot access some technology, then it is not revolutionary”.

    The second aim of the project is the promotion of digital literacy. Digital literacy should promote a joyful user experience that is non-exploitative. It should also foster a sense of community–“no-one is an island”.

    To this end, the scope of the people’s permacomputer project was deliberately limited to programs around or just over 100 lines. Definitely not more than 200.

    The project therefore decided to investigate BASIC as the paradigmatic human-computer interface for the permacomputer.

    For the application towards which it was targeted, the investigation the project has done so far into BASIC has been fruitful, and even quite surprising–the 70s/80s hobby computing scene was far richer and more creative than the project previously assumed: not less than five (5) different text editors in BASIC were unearthed!