After some moderate success squeezing almost an entire 'home computer' into a simple Cortex-M microcontroller with 32K of RAM, it was time to step back and take stock. What makes a 'computer' into a 'platform', and what can we learn from the past? This is one person’s attempt to produce a usable computer than any one single person could understand in its entirety - take a walk through OS history, and learn what makes Neotron OS quite unlike a typical embedded operating system.