The Rif War

One of the lesser known 20th century wars gets an Alternate History

Review: Sky People

A Polish Zero?

The Poles develop a fast, maneuverable fighter comparable to the Japanese Zero in the late 1930s.  

Point Of Divergence is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas.  Here is my comment section.

This isn't directly alternate history, but it somehow seems close to it to me.  I've long been aware that there is a subculture of people that continue to use long discontinued or decidedly non-mainstream computers as though Microsoft and Windows had never become a dominant force in the computer market.  I hadn't really been aware of how many little groups of such holdouts there are until lately.
     In many cases these are groups of active computer hobbyists, trying to keep their systems alive and advancing, and in a lot of cases even build new computers compatible with the old ones.  For example, there are still active Commodore 64, Amiga, and Apple II users decades after those computers went out of production.  In each of those cases, hobbyists have even created work-alike hardware using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)--essentially chips that allow you to turn them into the equivalent of pretty much any chip or chips that will fit in the number of gates available.

    In the case of the C64. there are at least two FPGA-based projects.  One of them fit all of the logic of a C64 into a board small enough to fit into a joystick along with 30 of the old C64 games.  They sold quite well at Christmas a year or two ago.  People that took the joystick apart discovered that it was designed to make expansion into a full-fledged C64 with keyboard and additional ports easy.  They also discovered that it had a 256 color mode that the original C64 didn't have.  The other C64 project is actually a board that can in theory turn itself into a C64, an Apple II, a TRS-80, and some oddball old European system.  It also has a super-C64 mode--sort of what the C64 might have become if Commodore had decent marketing.
    There are also software projects to recreate various operating systems as Open Source, and then modernize them.  AROS tries to recreate the Amiga operating system.  FreeDos tries to recreate MsDos (the old command prompt that people had to use before Windows came along) with a lot of extras.  OpenGEM (which runs on top of FreeDos) extends Digital Research's GEM operating system, which briefly competed with Windows as a GUI on top of MsDos.  There are projects to create Open Source versions of BeOS (created by an ex-Apple CEO), an Open Source multi-tasking Graphics oriented operating system to run on "expanded" Commodore 64s--some of which have megabytes of memory, gigabytes of hard drive space, and a processor that runs 20+ times as fast as the original 6510, and probably cost their owners far more than most modern PCs would have.
    Some groups are trying to defy the common wisdom that creating an entirely new operating system and making it catch on is simply not possible in a Windows-dominated world.  The Open Source Syllable operating system and the commercial SkyOs fit in that category.  Both are still a long ways from ready for people to go out and use them as their primary operating system, but they keep improving and may eventually carve out a little niche for themselves. 
    The group creating ReactOs is trying to defy Microsoft's dominance in another way.  They are trying to create a Windows-compatible Open Source operating system.  What they have so far is still very much alpha--not something that you would actually want to use.  On the other hand, they hae been able to recycle a lot of code from Linux's Wine project (a way to run Windows programs in Linux), and they've come a long ways in the last year or so.
    In computers you can to some extent create a world where you can act as though something you don't like, such as Microsoft dominance, simply didn't happen, and dozens of little groups around the world are doing exactly that.

Revised version - Posted on Feb 3, 2012.

More Stuff For POD Members Only

What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA.  POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.