This morning has been really frustrating. I tried so many times to work on something and my computer just kept getting in the way. Instability, slowness, broken tools, distractions; a constant stream of events bent on breaking my concentration, trying my patience and evaporating gumption.
All rather discouraging.
I need a place to work where this doesn't happen.
The Swyft environment on my Apple //e is a place like this, but I can't take it with me. The Beaver computer I'm working on will be a place like this, but it doesn't exist yet. The chicken-and-egg problem of finishing The Beaver is that I have to work on it in this disruptive place, with so little time and capacity to work on it and on mornings like this one I wonder how I'll ever get there.
A while back I wrote about "how to get there from here" and talked myself out of using emulation or something akin to it to bootstrap The Beaver, but this morning I'm warming-up to that, or something like it. If I have to wait until I finish the hardware and the software to start working in a less disruptive environment... it's going to take a long time and more energy that I probably have.
So right about now I'm considering alternatives.
The one that feels most attractive is something I'm calling "The Environment". Not a virtual machine or emulator in the traditional or strictest sense but more like a virtual space to work in that is isolated from the hardware/software/etc. where it is running. This is like a virtual machine, but not strictly from the computer-science perspective, more like from the personal perspective. It doesn't have to be made of the same things as a VM or provide the same sort of technical isolation from the host but simply isolate the person working in it from these outside influences.
This is interesting to me because it could be composed of things that might already exist, may be temporary and don't need to fit into a strict linear path between where we are and what I want to accomplish with The Beaver. The important thing is that they provide an environment in which to do the work and that can evolve over time to utilize the product of the work as it becomes available.
The other thing that is important about The Environment is that it is portable. I already have a non-portable version of this in the Swyft-powered Apple //e, and when I can work on it, it's incredibly productive. But as I said before, I can't take it with me, not even to another room in the same house, and this puts a serious damper on how much time I have to work there. So whatever The Environment is, it needs to be portable enough that I can use it from whatever machine I have available.
This makes me lean toward something networked, but that puts a lot of encumbrances on the thing right out of the gate. I'm not ruling this out, but it definitely gives me pause.
It could be something that lives on a flash drive, built into multi-platform/architecture binaries that use shared data (this is essentially how my Pouch tools work). This is interesting but it probably limits The Environment to a terminal-based text-only thing. This is true for the Swyft //e as well, and might be good enough for awhile.
It could be a bootable environment, something like a Linux-based bootable USB that transitions into The Environment. That would allow the portability of the flash drive without the complexity of working with multiple operating systems and make it easier to do something graphics-based. It also means that while The Environment is running there's no interference from an underlying host operating system (instability, slowness or distracting notifications, etc.). It kind of feels like a lot to have to reboot the machine into The Environment, and creating such a bootable thing means fooling around with Linux a bit (probably), but of the options so far it feels like the most interesting one.
None of these feel quite right to me but this train of thought does feel right, so I'm going to keep riding it. Maybe I'll do a little homework and experimentation with creating a bootable flash drive and see how far I can get; maybe it's easier than it used to be? If nothing else the act of doing the work often results in more ideas to choose from and explore whereas talking about it too long tends to just get me stuck.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026