About

I'm Tony Atkins. 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 most people consider retired. There's a YouTube channel of the same name.

The IT and security background matters more than you'd think, because a lot of this is about trust. NetISA is about getting old machines onto modern networks without turning them into a liability, and Atlas is about knowing exactly what code runs from the moment the power comes on. 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.

Honestly, this is also how I look after my head. The world is loud and the day job is stressful, and an old PC is a small, quiet problem that eventually has an answer. When a 286 finally boots something it couldn't boot yesterday, everything else can wait for a minute.

Barely Booting started with a question: could I turn my 286 into a daily driver? Not as a novelty, 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. These days that's two projects, Atlas 286, a BIOS of my own for the 286, and NetISA, the network card I started with.

Atlas has been booting DOS on my real Packard Bell PB686 since October 2026. NetISA is still a pile of parts and simulated logic, and whether it works on real iron is very much an open question. That's part of the fun. I write it all up because building in public beats building alone, and because if any of it works, I want anyone to be able to use it.

AI SLOP

I build all of this with a lot of help from Claude, Anthropic's AI model. It writes a good share of the code and documentation, and it drew the Atlas 286 font. So it's a fair question whether this is AI slop.

Slop is what you get when someone asks a model for something and publishes whatever comes back without checking it. It's the confident article that's quietly wrong, the project page promising the world for something that has never been switched on, the picture of a hand with six fingers that nobody bothered to count. It looks finished, and nobody stands behind it.

Here's why I don't think this is a six-fingered hand:

• Nothing counts until it's tested, and the tests have to prove they can fail. Every change that alters how Atlas behaves comes with a copy broken on purpose, and its test has to catch it. A test that can't fail gets thrown out.
• Real hardware gets the final word. Atlas has had about twenty recorded sessions on the real PB686 in its first three weeks, and every claim on this site says whether it was proven on real hardware, in an emulator or on a CPU model. The bugs are listed as plainly as the wins.
• It isn't quick. I've been at Barely Booting since April 2026 and on the PB686 since the summer. Atlas is young, but it gets tested the same slow way: run it, check it, run it again.
• A human makes every decision. I decide what gets built, what ships and what goes on this page. I run the bench, and I'm accountable for every byte, including the ones Claude wrote. If something here is wrong, that's on me, and I want to hear about it.

Commits that had AI help say so. NetISA is honest the other way round: it hasn't been built, so this site doesn't claim it works.

Thanks

None of this happens on my own, and I'd rather say so out loud. Thank you to:

• Piers Finlayson for One ROM, which turned a burn-and-swap EPROM cycle into a few minutes and is most of why Atlas's real-hardware testing moves as fast as it does.
• JJ Dasher for ATABoy, whose drive dumps keep Atlas's disk code honest.
• Keir Fraser for Greaseweazle, which makes my floppy tests trustworthy.
• The people behind 86Box, Unicorn, NASM, Capstone, XTIDE Universal BIOS, ESP-IDF, Icarus Verilog, Open Watcom and DOSBox-X, whose free work all of this stands on. The Atlas page and the NetISA page say what each one does for the projects.
• The people whose prior work shaped NetISA: Crypto Ancienne, WinGPT, PicoMEM, FrogFind and Browservice.
• The Retro Web, the community database of old motherboards, chips and manuals. Its PB686 page backs up the chipset note in the Library.
• DOS Days, which keeps the kind of thing that otherwise vanishes. The TI chipset datasheets it hosts helped me work out the PB686, and the Iomega Zip DOS drivers I tested Atlas against came from there too.
• Adrian Black of Adrian's Digital Basement (and adriansbasement.com), the YouTube channel that got me into all of this.
• The Internet Archive, for rescuing GeoCities, and 泓翔, who made the rainbow bar at the bottom of this page in February 1997 and signed it.
• Anthropic, for Claude, which writes a lot of the code here (see above for who's accountable for it).

If I've used your work and left you out, that's a mistake on my part. Tell me and I'll fix it.

Say hello

I'm on VOGONS, GitHub and YouTube.

Email me at hello@barelybooting.com. If I've got something wrong on here, I'd really like to know.