BARELY BOOTING_
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Barely Booting

> Building new hardware for old computers.

Animated: Cathode text-mode browser cycling through five pages. Start page with block-letter CATHODE logo; about:portal curated text web; NPR news with green-bullet headlines; OpenBSD man server with dense link grid; barelybooting.com homepage.
Cathode: a text-mode web browser for DOS and Windows. Sort of.
Animated: TAKEOVER VGA plasma title screen with green-cyan-white color cycling and pixel font logo
TAKEOVER: five AI scenarios, VGA plasma, AdLib FM.

I’m Tony. By day I work in cybersecurity. By night I’m trying to get vintage PCs onto the modern internet, probably the hard way.

NetISA is the hardware: an ISA card with an ESP32-S3 for WiFi and TLS 1.3, bridged to the bus by a CPLD. The crypto runs on the card so an 8088 doesn’t have to pretend it can do RSA. On top of that sits a DOS software stack: CATHODE (text-mode browser, DOS plus a Windows port) and HEARO (music player, 24 audio devices). CERBERUS is a three-headed diagnostic that figures out what vintage hardware actually is and whether it’s telling the truth. Separately, TAKEOVER is an AI takeover simulator that has nothing to do with networking. I got carried away with demoscene effects.

Software runs in DOSBox-X today. Hardware is on the bench since 2026-04-23. Bench assembly is next, and that is where I fully expect things to start going wrong. Everything is open source so you can watch it happen.

Bus8/16-bit ISA
CPU8088 to 486+
WiFi802.11 b/g/n
TLS1.3 (hardware)
TSR< 2 KB
LicenseMIT / CERN-OHL-P

Follow the build

Community

This project lives where the retro community does. Come say hi, ask questions, tell me what I’m doing wrong (there is probably a lot).

Most of this is me learning in public.