The KoraOS Manifesto

Once upon a time, you switched on your home computer and, in an instant, you were there. A blue screen with an OK prompt. A black screen with a blinking cursor beside >. Maybe, if you were lucky, a command line inside a window.

It was just you and the machine: no boot wizards, no passwords, no login screens.

You could start writing a program in BASIC. You could load another one. You could drop in a game and just play. And when you were done, you switched it off. That was the idea.

There was no Internet so, unless you played a game you bought or borrowed from a friend, you had to type it in yourself, line by line, character by character, from a listing printed in a magazine. Two pages of code that, after an evening of squinting, finally gave you a clumsy version of Space Invaders. Nothing special. A rougher take on a game that was already pretty simple.

But you had coded it. And chasing the bugs (almost always a typo, or two lines swapped around) felt like something that was yours.

Then you started to experiment: draw a circle, write your own Hangman. You learned by talking to friends, by reading magazines, and, best of all, by typing commands with random values just to see what would happen.

PEEK and POKE were the magic words: read any byte in memory, write any byte anywhere. Put the wrong value in the wrong place and you might discover how to change the border color. Or, far more likely, freeze the whole machine. It didn’t matter. You turned it off and on again, and started over.

What KoraOS is

KoraOS is what a home computer would look like in 2026.

The hardware is already in your hands: a small, cheap (well, until recently) Raspberry Pi, with a multi-core CPU, fast storage, and a real GPU. What’s missing is an operating system that treats it like a home computer instead of a tiny server.

KoraOS is for the user/developer, Terry A. Davis’ phrase for the person who is both at once. Someone who doesn’t want another Linux clone, but a machine to play with. To experiment. To PEEK and POKE everywhere, watch what happens, and, when it all falls over, turn it off and on again.

There’s no memory protection, no sandbox, no permission dialogs standing between you and the hardware. The whole machine is yours, the way it used to be.

Where it’s headed

Not all of this exists yet; this is the direction, not a checklist of what’s done.

• Runs on the Raspberry Pi 3/4, with QEMU for development
• No memory protection: PEEK and POKE wherever you like
• GPU support
• Multi-core support
• A FAT32 filesystem
• A BASIC and a Python shell
• Networking
• …and much more

Switch it on. Experiment. And if something breaks, you already know what to do.