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NetBSD on a JavaStation

Hard as it may be to imagine, there was a time when Java was brand new and exciting. Long before it became the vast clunky back-end leviathan it is today,

Waiting for that package to arrive was painful; I was checking the tracking details obsessively and experienced a great deal of frustration and bafflement as it moved around the country in completely bizarre directions. Every time I thought I’d have another go at it, the memories of failed attempts at recapping other devices came to mind, and I couldn’t bear the idea of spending so many hours on trying to fix and replace components, only to have it still not work at the end. In case you’re confused by that last sentence, you need to know that Sun’s bootloader environment from that period was called OpenBoot, and consisted of a FORTH interpreter, from which you can interrogate the device tree and pretty much do whatever you want.

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