Top all-time · #1942
Julio Merino
Personal blog · blogsystem5.substack.comsystemsprogramming
Julio Merino writes Blog System/5, a personal blog at blogsystem5.substack.com about systems and programming. Since 2023, 40 different Hacker News readers have linked it 103 times, most often “Revisiting the DOS Memory Models”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-21, and you can follow it by feed.
A newsletter on operating systems, build systems, programming languages, software engineering, and my own software projects. Specifics include FreeBSD, Linux, Rust, Bazel and EndBASIC. Click to read Blog System/5, by Julio Merino, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- Revisiting the DOS Memory Models5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-09-30
- Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-12-17
- Hardware Discovery: ACPI and Device Tree4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-03-01
- Porting the EndBASIC Console to an LCD3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-04-26
- Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-09-09
- 20 Years of blogging and why Substack is king3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-06-22
- BazelCon 2024 Recap3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-10-22
- Revisiting the NetBSD Build System3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-12-28
- The costs of the i386 to x86-64 upgrade3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-10-07
- Running GNU on DOS with Djgpp3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-02-14
What Hacker News says?
> It's fantastic for catching when a bunch of processes haven't been killed and are stuck at 100%. Exactly! I've been using iStat Menus for years and I find it invaluable. I've been able to identify system-wide problems a few times already just by glancing at the graphs and going "huh, that should not be happening right now". And it's not just stuck processes, but also misbehaving processes. I did blog about this si…
Comment linking /p/hard-disk-leds-and-noisy-machines
on “Stats – macOS system monitor in your menu bar”Submitted IDEs we had 30 years ago as a story · 683 points
HN discussionThis should be mandatory reading for arch-btw users: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design
Comment linking /p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design
on “WSL3 Performance is about 5-60% faster than WSL2 depending on the workload”Submitted Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison as a story · 648 points
HN discussionOriginal author here. Thanks for sharing! I see various comments below along the lines of “oh, the article is missing so and so”. OK… then please see the other articles in this series! I think they cover most of what you are mentioning :-) The first was on EMS, XMS, HMA and the like: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/from-0-to-1-mb-in-dos The second was on unreal mode: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/beyond-the-…
Comment linking /p/x86-64-programming-models
on “Revisiting the DOS Memory Models”Submitted IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023) as a story · 617 points
HN discussionYou should read the very first article I wrote in this “series” then, linked to from the opening paragraph: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/from-0-to-1-mb-in-dos (previously discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39031369 at the beginning of the year).
Comment linking /p/from-0-to-1-mb-in-dos
on “Revisiting the DOS Memory Models”Submitted Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines as a story · 198 points
HN discussionI checked, and it was Win3.11 that came on 8 floppies! https://archive.org/download/dos-622-3 Windows 95 was almost 30: https://ia803207.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22... Another fun article currently on the front page, diving into the insanity that is 8086/286/386 addressing modes: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/from-0-to-1-mb-in-dos Even these "simple" operating systems managed to pack an incredib…
Comment linking /p/from-0-to-1-mb-in-dos
on “A 2024 Plea for Lean Software”Submitted Revisiting the DOS Memory Models as a story · 182 points
HN discussionThe article describes the author's walk through various companies (Sun, Joyent, Oxide) and how his blogging evolved with (and thanks to!) them. Not quite what I expected, particularly the points about how Sun truly encouraged blogging, so it was interesting in that regard. The many links to older articles help paint a good picture of this story. As for "conclusions"... I also hit the 2-decade mark earlier this year…
Comment linking /p/20-years-of-blogging
on “Blogging Through the Decades”Submitted Hands-On Graphics Without X11 as a story · 166 points
HN discussionhttps://blogsystem5.substack.com/about https://www.twoscomplement.org/#podcast The latter includes full text transcripts so I think it fits your spec
Comment linking /about
on “Please help me find better blogs to read”Submitted How DOS was able to use most of the 1 MB address space of the 8086 as a story · 145 points
HN discussionEg. 1 in 10 open source projects abandon bazel within 2 years. https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/bazelcon-2024-recap
Comment linking /p/bazelcon-2024-recap
on “Faster CI with Selective Testing”Submitted Revisiting the NetBSD Build System as a story · 142 points
HN discussionHappy to see this shared again! The previous submission was ~1 year ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39292990 , although it did not spark significant discussion threads. Also, here are the related articles from this series: * https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/from-0-to-1-mb-in-dos * https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/running-gnu-on-dos-with-d... * https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/dos-memory-models
Comment linking /p/dos-memory-models
on “Beyond the 1 MB barrier in DOS”Submitted The costs of the i386 to x86-64 upgrade as a story · 118 points
HN discussionTwo years ago, I spent time studying the Windows NT kernel internals and ended up writing a comparison against Unix here: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design . What I came out of that exercise with is that NT is actually well-made and was very ambitious and advanced at the time it was designed (although free systems have caught up by now). But what I also came out thinking was: none of that…
Comment linking /p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design
on “Microsoft Needs Windows Lite”Submitted Picking Glibc Versions at Runtime as a story · 117 points
HN discussionThis is explained in the original article linked in the first sentence: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/ssh-agent-forwarding-and-...
Comment linking /p/ssh-agent-forwarding-and-tmux-done
on “SSH-agent broken in tmux? I've got you”Submitted The next generation of Bazel builds as a story · 89 points
HN discussionI've been blogging for 22 years now. At the beginning I could tell I had a relatively steady audience based on frequent comments (when comments on blogs were a thing). These died off over the years. Then, in 2020, I implemented my own unobtrusive subscription mechanism and email distribution to try to regain such an audience. And... it's pretty disappointing. I've gotten less than 200 subscribers that way; conversio…
Comment linking /p/20-years-of-blogging
on “Substack writers, you need a website”Submitted Whatever Happened to Sandboxfs? as a story · 81 points
HN discussionThat's a good reason, I might do the same. I certainly used to twiddle that setting trying to make space for Sim City 2000 on an 80MB disk. I see a major footgun in memory compression that Linux doesn't care about - it'll just oomkill your shit, hence TFA. But footguns are not acceptable in mass-market software. Apple also removes them. It's easy to look at the half-baked ui libraries and fucking Teams and fucking S…
Comment linking /p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design
on “PostgreSQL and the OOM Killer: Why You Must Use Strict Memory Overcommit”Submitted Beyond the 1 MB barrier in DOS as a story · 81 points
HN discussionShameless plug for my https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/beyond-the-1-mb-barrier-i... article from a couple of years ago. You'll find a deep dive on unreal mode (I just learned it's also known as "vodoo mode") and some hands-on code to play with it ;-P
Comment linking /p/beyond-the-1-mb-barrier-in-dos
on “80386 Memory Pipeline”Submitted Code reviews: A success story as a story · 64 points
HN discussionSubmitted BazelCon 2024 Recap as a story · 53 points
HN discussionSubmitted Build files are the best tool to represent software architecture as a story · 50 points
HN discussion
