Join Jonathan for a journey through a brief history of computing, and a look inside the DOS he is writing to run on common-or-garden Arm microcontrollers.

Jonathan Pallant is an embedded systems engineer, born and bred just outside Cambridge. Having worked his way up from Microsoft BASIC via Turbo Pascal, he spent most of his career with illustrious local consultancies writing very expensive C. This all started to change however, after being bowled over by the Rust Programming Language back in 2016. He helped form the Rust Embedded Working Group and has added support for the language on several different microcontrollers, as well as writing and maintaining countless open-source libraries written in it. These days he even teaches the language through his job at Ferrous Systems.

A life-long love of his first computer - a Commodore 64C - has spiralled out of control into something of a retro obsession. Collecting, repairing, and using everything from a Commodore 128D to an Acorn RiscPC, his time using just plain weird operating systems we don't really think about any more led to a question - what is an Operating System anyway, and why is everything so damned complicated these days?

 

The talk will begin at 7pm and last around 90 minutes, with the opportunity to ask questions afterwards.

Payment is taken by PayPal immediately. Please print a copy of the receipt that is displayed at the end of the payment process and bring it with you as your e-ticket.