Ashet Technologies™ is an art project revolving around the Ashet Home Computer™. Its primary goal is to recreate the 80ies home computer experience, but in a more modern environment.
Modern computers are impressive and useful machines, but also so complex that most people are overwhelmed. You have to learn about virtual memory even before you are able to even learn to handle regular memory. You have to learn about syscalls before ever using MMIO.
In contrast to this, on a good ol' Z80 system, writing to a
serial port was a single OUT ($10), A instruction that directly wrote to the serial port. Back in the
time you were able to fully understand your machine. Not only you did know how to write a console app, but you were
also able to use every component of the machine without drivers, as you had all the direct access, and the hardware
interface was mostly simple.
The Ashet Home Computer™ project tries to recreate that experience under the hood of the Ashet Technologies™ fake company. That company is settled in a cyberpunk dystopian world similar to the one found in Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2077. The "products" and software by that company are all components of the bigger picture, together creating an environment where you can have the Home Computer Experience in modern times.
The Ashet Home Computer™ is designed to be simple enough to be grasped fully by a novice programmer or user and should enable people to learn about computers and programming. A secondary design goal is to create an actually usable computer, not only a toy. Definitly not competetive to modern PCs or single board computers, but still able to connect to the internet, create documents and pictures and play games.
The project draws inspiration from the late-80ies home computers like the Amiga 500, Acorn Archimedes and others, but also tries to create a more cyberpunk inpsired look and feel.
The project is designed as an open source project, so people can easily join and contribute. All source code and hardware descriptions can be found at git.random-projects.net.
The project is mainly driven by Felix "xq" Queißner, a retro and computer enthusiast from southern germany.
If you want to join the project or want to learn more, feel free to drop me an email under info@ashet.computer