Flynn 1.0.1 is released and usable for day-to-day telnet things.

I dropped it into a few shared folders on #globaltalk shares and added it to both Macintosh Garden and Macintosh Repository.

Feel free to try it out, test it, break it and let me know of any issues. I already have a list of features to add to 2.0 and plan to start working on those later this week.

https://github.com/ecliptik/flynn/releases/tag/v1.0.1
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/87841-flynn
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/flynn

#marchintosh #retrocomputing #classicmacintosh #telnet

@micheal I’ve been wanting to try to build something with Codex or Claude to run on system 7 - any tips or recommendations to get started?

@jonschwenn

tldr; start small, have Claude make a plan, execute and repeat.

I started with a markdown document that had a list of features and requirements (telnet support, target is System 6 in a Mac Plus, use C). I also put some reference code and pdf documents on Macintosh programming in the repo (but not committed), told it to use retro68 for cross compile and basilisk for testing. Basically something to start with.

I then used Claude Team Orchestration [1] with Opus 4.6 High Thinking, and asked it to review the docs, reference material, ask me questions and make a plan.

Once the plan was done I asked to create a dev team and start implementing the plan, steering things as necessary with everything committed to git.

Biggest hurdles were it tried to use docker containers for retro68 (eventually I told it to build from source) and switching to Snow for emulation since it had issues with BasiliskII.

I tried to be clever and have Claude test things too, taking screenshots, and having it write python scripts to use the keyboard/mouse on X (this was all done on a Linux system). It worked, but was slow and prone to error. Now I just have Claude build and start Snow with the new version and test it myself, providing feedback to Claude.

I think Claude worked well for this app because it was relatively simple and I added features incrementally. I also heavily used Claudes memory (remember this) which helped it avoid doing the same thing twice.

Hopefully this helps. I'm planning to write a blog post on this as well as I took notes (ironically in a physical notebook) on the process.

1. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-teams