Previously: Frontier in the Terminal With a REPL By this point, the easy parts were mostly already over. Frontier was no longer a pile of old source to coax into compiling. It was running headless. It could load old databases. It had a new REPL so I could do basic command-line interactions, and more and more […]

In the AI online space lots of folks are arguing about models. Which one codes better. Which one has the bigger context window. Which one wins the benchmark this week. Which one halucinates less. Is Claude Code or Codex or Gemini CLI better, or should I use an open source harness like Pi. The model and […]

Previously: Old databases are new again Why implement a REPL? And what the heck is a REPL anyway? Why should I care? As some remember, classic Frontier had the QuickScript Window: Type some UserTalk, click Run, get the result in a little output area. It was useful, and we used it. A lot! While working […]

Once I got Frontier building and runing headless (the bootstrap), the next question was: Can this thing survive contact with its own past? This was going to be essential because Frontier doesn’t do very much without at least Frontier.root (the system database) and applications like mainResponder.root, manila.root, and all of their friends and siblings. This […]

Previous: A new Frontier: The Real Start The early phase isn’t dramatic, but it’s important. Before Frontier could become useful again, it had to be buildable on modern operating systems, readable, writable, browsable… survivable. This is where the rubber hit the road. One could easily imagine that the hard part about a project like this […]

Previous: Reviving UserLand Frontier (and friends) When I started working on modernizing Frontier last October, the obvious story would have been “old codebase gets ported to modern hardware.” That’s not wrong per se, but it’s not what actually happened. I had already had multiple conversations with ChatGPT in early/mid-2025 about how a this project might […]

I’m starting a set of posts about how I’m using AI to help bring UserLand Frontier back to life. I found Frontier in 1995 when I was living in Amsterdam (another story), and was trying to figure out how to automate dialing into my ISP at night while I was asleep and phone charges were […]

Today we said goodbye to Pickles the Wonder Pug, aka Black Lightning. He gave our family nine years of unconditional love, snugs, snorts, and romps—guarding our safety, and protecting us from garbage collectors, mailmen, airplanes, and helicopters. He passed peacefully with his whole family around him. Rest in peace, Pick-pick. ❤️❤️❤️

I’ve been meaning to do this forever, and now the deed is done. I’ve been self-hosting my blog in one way or another, across many platforms and machines since 1997(!), and though I still run my own services for some stuff, keeping my WordPress site healthy, updated, and secure is work I can’t justify doing […]

My son Gabe interviewed me today about my take on how music has changed over the years with changes in the music industry, changes in music production and technology, and why the music he and I both love so much from the ’70’s and ’80’s is different than so much of the music of today. […]