1988 OBJECTS / 2026 INTELLIGENCE

AI System 6

A local-first writing desk where the AI never becomes your voice.
One route from your raw questions to a finished piece. Projects in your browser. A stateless server. Two floppy disks.

BOOT IT NOW  ·  THE FILM  ·  PRODUCT SITE  ·  MAC BETA  ·  简体中文

_{YOUR GITHUB THEME JUST PICKED AN ERA: LIGHT IS 1988, DARK IS 2026.
TWELVE APPEARANCES IN ALL. NO MODEL REQUIRED TO LOOK AROUND.}

OPEN A SINGLE WINDOW: CMF Studio · Bonsai City · Endfield Terminal · Time Machine · OpenTTD · DOOM

OR READ A FINISHED DISK: the whole shelf, opened on the newest · After the Bridge Opens · Why the First iPad Had Only 256MB of Memory · iPhone 12 Pro Max

_{EVERY APP HAS ONE SHAREABLE ADDRESS, /go/<app-id>. THE DESK OPENS AROUND IT. THE THIRTY-SIX DEMONSTRATION PROJECT DISKS USE THE SAME ADDRESS RULE, AND THE DEMONSTRATION PROJECT DISKS FOLDER ON THE STARTUP DISK (OR FILE › OPEN DEMONSTRATION PROJECT DISKS…) LISTS EVERY ONE, AND /go/disks OPENS IT READING THE NEWEST.}

Contents

• Recent progress
• What's new in 1.0.59
• Earlier releases
• What this protects
• Run it in 60 seconds
• The route is the product
• Chat is an app. Not the whole computer.
• What the constraint still leaves room for
• Bonsai City
• One More Tune
• It also runs DOOM
• One desk. Twelve systems.
• Built under a 1988 constraint
• Bring your own model
• How this repository keeps itself honest
• How the repository is laid out
• Contributing

Recent progress

• Read the blog as a native app. 潮汐信笺 opens aaronlau.me in a real AI System 6 window: 2,463 posts, notes, tags, archive and series, with full-text search in all twelve appearances and on a phone. The blog publishes a versioned content pack; the app caches it, so Refresh picks up new posts without reinstalling and what you have already read stays available offline.
• Edit the Office files you already have, on the desk. Excel workbooks (.xlsx) open in ClioChart, PowerPoint decks (.pptx) in ClioStage, and Word documents (.docx) in ClioWrite. Express changes cell values, slide text and notes, or paragraph text; Full Editing adds formulas, slide and layout commands, and headings, emphasis and lists. Tables, charts, SmartArt and pictures stay read-only and are kept, and comments can be read, added and answered. Saving keeps everything else in the file as it was; the first save lists, in plain words and with the sheet or page, anything that will be converted or lost, and Cancel is the default. Edit › Undo steps back through named changes. Nothing is created from scratch yet, and the round trip has been checked in LibreOffice for all three formats and in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint for Mac; the Word check is still to come.
• Turn source text into a diagram or slide deck. ClioChart keeps the source sentence behind each diagram element. ClioStage lets you edit the slide itself and preview the page before printing. AI drafting needs a connected model. Check the result before sharing it.
• Keep editing after an image moves between apps. Insert a diagram, drawing or cover as an editable copy. When the original changes, choose whether to sync the copy. Each editor keeps its own undo history.
• Return to the window you need. Dock previews show an app’s windows before you choose one. In Mac OS X appearances, the Dock starts off; enable it in the Control Panel. All twelve appearances remain available.
• Read more of the web. Time Machine uses a separate browsing service to run page scripts. Without that service, it labels the page as a snapshot. Reader tries other ways to extract an article when the first attempt fails. Some sites still need your external browser.
• Build a town, plan its transport, then drive through it. Bonsai City, Rootline and Joyride share city data. Rootline plans Metro, BRT and Bus routes. Joyride drives a city snapshot without changing the original save. Plaintext offers a separate Chinese story with local saves.

Projects stay in your browser. Export a backup to keep another copy. You can explore the desktop, play games and open the 36 demonstration project disks without connecting an AI model.

Release details: 1.0.59, 1.0.58, 1.0.57 and 1.0.56

What's new in 1.0.59

• The blog is a new window on the desk. 潮汐信笺 reads aaronlau.me in a real AI System 6 window: 2,463 posts, two notes, tags, archive and seven threads, with full-text search, in all twelve appearances and on a phone. The site publishes a versioned content pack, and the app keeps a local copy, so Refresh picks up new posts without reinstalling, while articles and search already loaded keep working offline. An App-scope original opens through the desk's browser.
• The Mac app starts on macOS 12, is notarized, and can carry a built-in model. The boot bundle no longer uses a form older WebKit rejects, so the Intel/Monterey app and older Safari start again; the 1.0.59 download and updates carry a Developer ID signature and Apple's notarization ticket, so the app opens with a double-click (a copy downloaded in a browser may still ask once), and a 1.0.58 ad-hoc install updates in place. On Apple silicon, Control Panel > Local Model offers Qwen3.5 4B (4-bit) as a separate consented download with its size, license and memory need shown first; it runs on this Mac and your text does not leave it.
• Edit Office files on the desk. Excel workbooks (.xlsx) open in ClioChart, PowerPoint decks (.pptx) in ClioStage, and Word documents (.docx) in a new ClioWrite window. Express changes cell values, slide text and notes, or paragraph text; Full Editing adds formulas, slide and layout commands, and headings, emphasis and lists. ClioWrite also appears on phones and tablets.
• Saving keeps the rest of the file as it was. Tables, charts, SmartArt and pictures stay read-only and are kept; comments can be read, added and answered. The first save lists, in plain words and with the sheet or page, anything that will be converted or lost, and Cancel is the default. Edit › Undo steps back through named changes. Nothing is created from scratch yet. The round trip has been checked in LibreOffice for all three formats and in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint for Mac; the Word check is still to come, and ClioWrite's icon is a temporary line drawing.
• About is a window you can leave open. It opens when you ask for it and no longer blocks the desk. It holds the film and the credits, and First time here offers three ways in: pick a Mac, write one line on a Note Pad slip, or watch the film. The startup checklist appears only when startup is slow or fails.
• Platinum reads more like Mac OS 9. Window frames, scroll bars, desktop and Apple-menu icons, the Control Strip, and the small text in lists, labels and status bars follow real Mac OS 9 screens. Bold titles, buttons and menus keep a bold face, because Geneva has none. Reading and editing text keep their modern sizes.
• Classic radio buttons and checkboxes show again. In some installs they had gone blank, so the Control Panel's AI Connection list showed only labels.
• The web desk can notify you and link to objects. When the tab is in the background, a new notification reaches you as a system notification; the first use asks for permission. Clicking it returns to the object it named, and a link such as ?open=scrapbook&id=… opens that object inside the project already on the desk.
• Plaintext (明文) has a new look and a longer story. A type-and-slip interface with a harbour-fog palette and ink-blue text, light by default and dark by system or setting. The white wolf is redrawn as frost, the true ending gains an epilogue, the side route becomes a friendship ending 同行, and chapter 10 adds four choices.

Earlier releases — 1.0.58 / 1.0.57 / 1.0.56 (click to expand)

1.0.58

• The Mac app moves to TinyJS on Apple silicon, macOS 15 or later. The complete app includes Node, the local server and the web desk. Updates check automatically; choose Install and Restart after work is saved and active model, import and export tasks finish. The first 1.0.58 OTA uses ad-hoc signing: it checks HTTPS, SHA-256 and the application signature, while Developer ID and notarization remain pending. First installation may need the macOS Open Anyway step.

• Mac collection stays under your control. Clipboard collection starts off. Selected text and screenshot OCR become editable candidates before you confirm their destination. The Mac Application panel also offers a selection shortcut, Quick Look and download controls. Existing model keys ask before migration to Keychain; failed or cancelled migration preserves the original configuration.

• Charts edit in place as real copies. Select a chart, choose 编辑副本, and it opens in ClioChart with its own undo; adopt lands as one undoable parent step while the source stays byte-identical. A parent edit under an open draft refuses the commit instead of overwriting either side.

• A context strip names the object you are on — the commands that apply to the current selection, with a stated reason for anything disabled, answering identically across all twelve appearances.

• Credibility when the network lies. A commit whose receipt the transport lost leaves the session explicitly uncertain and reconciles by querying the original request — it never re-fires the write or reports a landed apply as cancelled.

• Open questions are notes too. Mark a scrap 待解：it keeps the quoted source, and its status moves only by your acceptance; similar questions surface as local, dismissible hints.

• Reading stays honest under version churn. Annotations remember their revision; only real content changes become review candidates; dead anchors keep your words flagged.

• Office files keep their own bytes. Bring a DOCX, XLSX or PPTX onto the File Floppy and the original package rides beside the extracted text copy; opening it asks once whether to edit the file itself or read the text copy in Reader. An unedited save returns the exact original bytes; after an edit only the touched parts are rewritten, and parts the editor does not model keep their original bytes. Round trips are held to semantic preservation guards; acceptance in Microsoft Office itself has not yet been run.

• ClioStage checks the page you are on. A real layout pass measures the printed page and reports text that overruns its frame, blocks crossing the page edge, placed blocks that overlap and distorted pictures. Locate the block, preview a geometry-only fix, adopt it as one undoable step, and re-check; a paper's numbers and quotes are never rewritten to pass a layout check. The deck also exports as a native PowerPoint file whose text stays editable and whose speaker notes stay notes.

• iWork imports read more and invent less. Pages, Numbers and Keynote text extraction keeps short notes and repeated sentences instead of dropping them, preview images are labelled as previews instead of being counted as pages, and a compressed stream that claims more memory than the import allows is refused before any allocation happens.

1.0.57

• The Dock runs several applications at once. With the Dock shown, a Mac OS X appearance always runs as MultiFinder (Mac OS X had no single-application mode), and Writing Studio keeps its place in the Dock. Resting on an icon shows that application's windows as cards with real pictures, a window put away keeping the picture it had, labelled; nothing moves until you choose a card. Each era's Dock menu follows its own captures (the window list with the current window ticked and minimized ones marked, Options, Show All Windows from Lion on, Hide and Quit), and Snow Leopard's and Lion's separator is drawn by projecting the glass shelf. The Dock still starts off; switch it on from the Control Panel's General page.
• Big Sur is drawn from macOS 11 itself. The Finder sidebar runs the full height of the window, windows take the wallpaper's tint, alerts are narrow, translucent and centred, pop-ups carry the blue arrow well in the front window, and Get Info and the Control Panel follow the preference panes.
• Controls say what state they are in, in every appearance. Disabled, focused, pressed and checked read the way they did on each era's own screen.
• ClioChart and ClioStage build from supplied text. ClioChart offers candidate drawings on an editable canvas, every box keeping the sentence it stands on; ClioStage drafts decks page by page and sends invented numbers and paraphrased quotes back for repair. Slides are edited directly on the page. Print Preview and printing use the same page layout.
• Consistent undo controls, with a separate history in each editor, plus guides, align, distribute and a layers panel on the canvases. Pictures travel between editors as editable copies and offer Sync when their original changes.
• Review Desk keeps comment threads on the manuscript, anchored by their words and never guessed back into place.
• ClioPaint has 1-bit layers; Cover Glass saves covers with real layers and removes a background with a small model shipped in the build; Text Lightroom develops layer by layer.
• ASCII storyboards from a script in TeachText or Quick Draft, with a PNG sheet, hand edits kept on update, and shots refined in Image Prompt Studio. A model is required; the real-model steps of its acceptance walk have not yet been run.

1.0.56

• Endfield Terminal has a refreshed v1.5 archive. The 2026-10-08 refresh includes 332 missions, 32 operators, 349 tutorials, 548 lore entries and 76 central documents. Dialogue and radio are both searchable; retained older records keep their own dates and versions. Danqingdu preparation is ready for the announced October 15 release, without treating previews as released story.

• Time Machine browses the current web, not just a cleaned snapshot. Pages run their own scripts on a separate browse origin, with requests passing through System 6's relay. Sign-ins and cookies are kept per site until File › Clear Browsing Data…, and WebSockets work. Wayback and archive.today captures open in the same view with their replay scripts running. Where the browse origin is not available, Time Machine falls back to the cleaned snapshot and labels it "Snapshot · page scripts not run". DRM video and WebRTC are not supported; File › Open in Your Browser hands a page over.

• Ads and trackers are blocked by uBlock Origin Lite's own rules (GPL-3.0, pinned release 2026.1006.1931): network rules plus each site's hiding rules, on by default, and switched off from Navigate › Stop Blocking Ads.

• Reader works its way down a ladder instead of giving up at the first shell. It tries the page, then the article data embedded in it, the extractor, AMP, Jina and the latest Wayback capture, and finally draws the page in the browse engine and reads what rendered. When nothing works it says which steps it tried. Chinese pages no longer lose their body text to the boilerplate filter. In the local and Mac app, File Floppy now peels containers: zip and gzip, eml and mbox (sender, recipients and date kept, the mail's words quoted verbatim), MHTML, EPUB in spine order, ODT/ODS/ODP, Jupyter notebooks, SVG text, GIF/TIFF OCR and the images inside Office files. A long cloud repair now runs in paragraph chunks and keeps any chunk it would have shortened.

• Twelve appearances. System 7, Tiger and Lion join the 1988-2026 line, and Drawing Board, the unreleased Mac OS 8.5 theme, joins NeXTSTEP as a branch. All twelve are regular choices in Special and the Control Panel.

• The newer apps have their own icons in every appearance. Rootline, Joyride and Plaintext now join the full icon families. Big Sur and NeXTSTEP also gain Image Prompt Studio, Lightroom and the four game icons. Each missing icon is redrawn with Image Gen for its era, then fitted to native sizes. These are original adaptations, not historical replicas.

• Minimize is real, and it has a place to go. Every Mac OS X era can draw its yellow lamp beside Close together with its own Dock, measured value by value against the era's captures: Jaguar's plain translucent panel, Snow Leopard's glass shelf, Big Sur's floating slab. Both start off: switch on Show Dock and minimizing on the Control Panel's General page when you want them. With either off nothing is stranded (the Apple menu lists put-away windows, and a switched-off minimize rolls them up in place). NeXTSTEP's Dock and miniaturize are its own shell and start on: the Dock holds its fixed applications, miniwindows sit along the bottom edge. WindowShade stays the title-bar double-click in every era.

• Platinum is Mac OS 9 and NeXTSTEP is 3.3, part by part. Tabs, bevel buttons, list headers, the window frame, scroll bars, sliders, dialogs and selected icons were re-measured against running systems; NeXTSTEP's main menu, window frame, controls, alert panel and File Viewer likewise, and it stays multitasking even in single-Finder mode.

• Lion's full-screen arrows are full screen. The window takes the display, the Dock steps aside and the menu bar waits at the top edge.

• The Writing Flow fits its era. NeXTSTEP hangs it under the main menu as a 3.3 panel; Platinum draws it as Mac OS 9's Application Switcher; both can close it, and every era can bring it back.

• Bonsai City, Rootline and Joyride now share one world: The Basin. The same city, calendar and names hold wherever a save is opened. Hezhou · 1952 is the worked example — a river town with a bridge, two rail stations, a level crossing and a subway — and Joyride drives it, or any Bonsai save, at street level instead of a private demo town.

• Rootline plans Metro, BRT and Bus as one transit dictionary. Switch mode from the bottom bar or press M; lay an avenue to run a BRT down its centre lane, spend a weekly avenue reward, and a leg with no bridge nearby still cannot cross the river. Stops, fares and the pot's own calendar come from the same city Bonsai City and Joyride see.

• Joyride rides the line Rootline planned. A photo now stamps the pot's seal, district and date into the Picture Album, and the drive opens on the pot you last drove instead of starting over. Keyboard, touch pedals, a steering wheel and a gamepad all drive the same read-only city snapshot; the drive never writes into a Bonsai save.

• Bonsai City can turn a bounded real place into a city. Its OSM path reads a geocoded area through the server relay, maps it onto the same 16-metre grid, carries the place's own street and station names into the save, and can add terrain elevation and optional building footprints. The UI and exports carry OpenStreetMap attribution and ODbL provenance; failed or incomplete terrain/building layers stay visible instead of becoming invented city data.

• Cover Glass gets an Aqua recipe, and small covers are checked before they export. A reflection-mix rim and a small-size check join the recipe, and a failed export says so instead of staying silent. A 4× export no longer renders into a clamped drawing buffer, and with Post Blur on, the subject can sit entirely under the whole cover's water.

• Plaintext joins the Games folder. An original Chinese-language visual novel about a ghostwriter and a mapmaker, now with super-resolved background plates and final character portraits, loaded only when its window opens, with local saves. File, Story and Debug live in the menu bar; the window has no empty details bar.

• Soundscape can bring an Apple Music link onto your own Mac. Paste an album, song or playlist link and the local host caches the playable result, preferring lossless when the optional engine and browser support it and falling back honestly to AAC. A VPS or Pages page only asks the paired Mac through the loopback bridge; Apple credentials and audio never go to the cloud.

• A Window menu appears in the Mac OS X eras, and only there. Aqua, Tiger, Snow Leopard, Lion, Yosemite, Big Sur and Liquid Glass gain a Window menu with All Windows…, Shade and Expand, Arrange Left, Arrange Right, Fill, Undo Arrangement, Bring Back Into View, and Pin Window / Unpin Window. The classic and NeXTSTEP-lineage appearances (System 6, System 7, Platinum, Drawing Board and NeXTSTEP) keep their own menus: All Windows is at the top of Special in the classic appearances and in NeXTSTEP’s Windows submenu. Narrow screens use Special too.

• All Windows… lists every open window, and restores the one you mean. The list spans every application, filters through a search field that leaves a composing input method alone, moves its cursor with the arrow keys without reordering the list, and restores the chosen window in its real state: a hidden application is shown, a minimized window returns from the Dock, and otherwise the window comes forward. Escape closes it and returns focus, and it loads the first time you open it. ⌘` walks the open windows of the front application; a window you rolled up stays rolled up as the walk passes it.

• A put-away window can be glanced at, and a flick arranges one. Resting on a rolled-up window's title bar for about 220 ms shows a temporary, read-only look at the window that writes nothing and ends when you move away or start a real action; a right-click hands off to the arrange menu. A title-bar drag followed by a flick runs the same shade, expand and fill command path as the menu.

• Preview a window before returning to it. All Windows shows the selected window’s picture; hovering over a Dock application shows its windows without taking focus. Put-away windows use the last available picture, clearly marked; unsupported captures say so. Keep or remove Dock shortcuts without quitting an application, and suspend or restore pinned windows together.

• Slide a window aside, or resize two together. Slide Over keeps the original window at either edge and can fold into a named tab. Split with Another Window links two visible windows with one draggable, keyboard-adjustable divider. Arrangements check minimum sizes first and undo as one change; hidden work stays hidden. Drag targets show what releasing will do. Dock hover previews and drag-edge Slide Over start on and can be turned off in Control Panel.

• A window comes back where you left it. Place, size and layer now hold across full screen, WindowShade, Hide, Dock minimize and returning to a project, so a window that has been put away and brought back returns to the spot you left rather than a default one.

• Each era's window controls answer to that era. System 7, Platinum and Drawing Board gain Mac OS 7-9's Application menu at the right end (Hide, Hide Others, Show All and the open applications). The Mac OS X eras' Window menu ends with Show Dock / Hide Dock and stays on the bar when the desk is empty. The application menu's first line names the application in front, and Minimize Window shows ⌘M.

• The twelve appearances were re-checked surface by surface against their native captures. Lion's background windows grey all three lamps, its buttons have 4-point corners and its Finder has the 10.7 sidebar. Snow Leopard's sidebar reads DEVICES and PLACES and its content is white again. Aqua's Finder toolbar captions Back and View and carries the places as labelled icons. Yosemite's alerts have its hairline frame, System 7's title bar loses a stray white row, Tiger's close lamp is round, and System 6's desktop icons are white only inside their silhouette. Every alert draws its own era's caution icon.

• Everyday parts got quieter and more honest. Icon names wrap at word breaks, list columns no longer run together, and Chinese body text uses each era's own CJK face instead of falling back to Song. A narrow window keeps its era's control sizes unless you are on touch. A help balloon points at what it explains and keeps clear of the menu bar, a menu taller than the screen shows that there is more, and ClioTalk's send button stays grey until a model is connected.

• Expression edits keep the author’s meaning and requested language. Humanizer and Make a Change now explicitly protect conditions, attribution, negation, comparison and certainty. Asking only to flag issues sends suggestions to ClioTalk without replacing the document. Taiwan usage applies only when asked for; requesting Traditional characters alone does not select a regional voice. Results arriving after cancellation, a project switch or an intervening edit cannot overwrite the captured document. Model-output comparisons are still pending; these are editing contracts, not a claim of measured quality gains.

What this protects

Writing with a language model is easy. Coming out the other side still sounding like yourself is not.

AI System 6 is built around one belief: your language, your sources, your judgment, your feeling for the subject, and your sense of who the piece is for are the valuable parts. A model will smooth all five into competent, forgettable prose if you let it hold the pen. So here it does not hold the pen.

• AI output is temporary until you save, clip, insert, or export it.
• You say where a reply lands — Question Sheet, Outline, the current Section Draft, the manuscript, or the Scrapbook — and whether it appends, replaces only your selection, or creates something new.
• Review Desk checks for drift into a model's voice: over-regular rhythm, generic summary language, personal detail flattened out, hedging that reads like a press release. It is the last stop for a reason.
• Your roughness is not a defect. Hesitation, an unresolved number, a personal aside, a sentence that is a little too blunt: these carry judgment, and the route is built to keep them rather than sand them off.

The Macintosh System 6 desktop is a constraint, not the pitch. Visible objects, deliberate saving, one writing task at a time. It is there because it makes every one of the promises above checkable by looking at the screen.

Run it in 60 seconds

Requires Node.js 24+. No API key, no account, no model.

git clone https://github.com/surfine/AI-System-6.git
cd AI-System-6
npm ci
npm start          # http://localhost:4173

The desktop boots with every non-AI tool working. Connect LM Studio, Ollama, DeepSeek, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint later, from the Control Panel.

npm run build            # deterministic desktop bundle
npm test                 # executable product contracts
npm run verify:public    # repository, command, asset, and docs gate

Or skip the clone and boot the live system in your browser. The Mac beta carries its own current Node runtime, so there is nothing to install at all.

The route is the product

Project Hard Disk → File Floppy → Question Sheet → Outline
  → Section Drafts → Manuscript → Review Desk → Project CD

Everything else in this repository is a tool you summon onto that route.

Writing Studio accepts freeform notes, puts AI outlining and drafting beside the editor, and lets you jump directly between sections. Articles show word counts; spoken scripts also show estimated timing. On narrow windows the next step has its own row. Review offers a direct return to editing and names Project CD as the save destination. A manuscript enters review only after its save succeeds; changing documents during a save cannot redirect that save into the new tab.

Stop	What it holds
Project Hard Disk	durable project state: references, drafts, clips
File Floppy	temporary context you mounted: PDFs, pages, audio, images
Question Sheet	the recipient, your raw questions, what you saw yourself
Outline	structure in your words; each ## becomes a draftable section
Section Drafts	one section at a time, with the editable owner made explicit
Manuscript	TeachText; read-only while drafting, so nothing rewrites it
Review Desk	facts, structure, and whether it still sounds like you
Project CD	finished Markdown and other explicit, read-only handoff exports

Question Sheet · the recipient, the raw questions, the objection you expect	Outline · four sections, still in the writer's words
Section Drafts · the unverified figure stays unverified	Manuscript · read-only while the drafts own the text

_{FOUR STOPS, PHOTOGRAPHED IN THE RUNNING APP BY npm run site:capture-route.
THE MATERIAL IS TYPED IN AS A WRITER WOULD TYPE IT. NO MODEL WAS CONNECTED.}

Alongside the route, summoned when you need them: Searcher and Reader for the live web, Time Machine for the current web and its archives, File Floppy for imports with OCR and transcription, Scrapbook for evidence you deliberately clipped, DocMap for structure, ClioTalk for conversation, and desk accessories that belong to writing — a Note Pad whose slips can be sent to TeachText, the Scrapbook or ClioTalk, a Dictionary, and a Writing Bell for one quiet interval. Image Prompt Studio turns a short idea into ready-to-paste GPT-Image and universal prompts; it writes the prompt, never the picture.

Chat is an app. Not the whole computer.

Chat is excellent at conversation. It is a poor filesystem, workspace, provenance model, and long-running project surface.

A chat product	This computer
One thread owns the workflow	MultiFinder keeps real working apps open together
Context disappears into a prompt	Sources, scraps, maps, drafts, and outputs stay visible
Generated text quietly becomes truth	AI output stays temporary until you keep it
The answer is the endpoint	The endpoint is a file, chart, deck, cover, or 3D object

flowchart LR
    A["Web / PDF / audio / image"] --> B["Searcher + Reader"]
    B --> C["Scrapbook"]
    C --> D["Question Sheet"]
    D --> E["Outline"]
    E --> F["Section Drafts"]
    F --> G["Manuscript"]
    G --> H["Review Desk"]
    H --> I["Markdown / PDF / slides / chart / cover"]
    M{{"LM Studio / Ollama / DeepSeek"}} -. "optional" .-> D
    M -. "optional" .-> F
    M -. "optional" .-> H

Loading

A disk tells you what lasts. A floppy tells you what is temporary. A Scrapbook contains only what you chose to keep.

What the constraint still leaves room for

The route stays primary, but a real computer can make room for other kinds of work without turning them into mandatory stops. These tools load only when summoned, and the writing objects keep the same meaning underneath them.

ClioChart · a Markdown table in the manuscript, projected as an editable chart	ClioStage · the same manuscript, presented as a deck
CMF Studio · a 3D colorway, exportable as USDZ for AR	Cover Glass · refractive WebGL typography

_{Image Prompt Studio · one idea becomes two ready-to-paste prompts}

_{FIVE WINDOWS OF THE RUNNING APP, CAPTURED OFFLINE. NO MODEL, NO NETWORK, NO MOCKUP.}

Bonsai City

Bonsai City is the desk's own city builder, written for AI System 6 rather than ported from somewhere else. Lay roads, rail and subway, zone the blocks, and a city grows around them.

• Three map sizes. 64², 96² and 128², with pacing tuned for each.
• A city that works. Transport and public services move people; power, police, fire, schools and clinics each cover the blocks around them, and the data views show where they fall short.
• Advisers, not autopilot. They tell you what the city is missing; the decisions stay yours.
• Saves stay with you. Cities are saved in your browser. A Micropolis city can be brought in.
• Day and night in 3D. The 3D view changes from day to night, and the 2D map is one switch away.
• Real places, with their paperwork attached. A bounded OSM import can seed a new city on the same 16-metre grid, with optional elevation and building layers. OpenStreetMap attribution and ODbL provenance travel with the city; incomplete optional layers remain explicitly incomplete.

_{THE EXAMPLE MID-SIZE CITY, 1903, POPULATION 1,245, CAPTURED FROM THE RUNNING APP. BUILD A CITY}

One More Tune

A quiz about the music Apple put in its ads. Every question plays itself, because the sound is the question: hear a few bars, name the ad.

• One record, ten tracks. The round sits on a white-label record with ten track positions, so a phone round fits on one screen; a saved round comes back with all ten questions at the place you reached.
• The reveal visits the era. Answer, and the original opens in a window of its own while the whole desk wears the appearance of the year the card belongs to, then hands your appearance back.
• Two keynote rounds. Relay follows the people who handed the stage to one another; Next Act asks what a famous line was doing and what came after it.
• Honest sound. The music is the store's own promotional preview. An unofficial quiz, made by a fan.

_{A ROUND IN LIQUID GLASS, CAPTURED FROM THE RUNNING APP. PLAY A ROUND}

It also runs DOOM

Seven games ship on this desktop, each in its own window next to the manuscript you were writing: three open-source classics, Bonsai City, two original games that share its city data boundaries, and Plaintext, a Chinese-language visual novel.

Game	What it is
Micropolis	the open-source release of the original SimCity
OpenTTD	the open-source Transport Tycoon Deluxe, in Chinese, with touch controls
DOOM	DOOM
Plaintext	an original Chinese-language visual novel about a ghostwriter and a mapmaker, loaded when its window opens, with local saves
Bonsai City	our own city builder: 64², 96² and 128² maps, working transport and public services, local saves, and a 3D city that changes from day to night
Rootline	a deterministic transit round: draw lines, carry passengers through the peaks, choose weekly rewards, and survive a crowding clock or keep building in Endless mode
Joyride	a 1996-style drive through a snapshot of your Bonsai City, without changing its save; colour or black-and-white rendering, with keyboard, touch or gamepad controls

Micropolis · Jan 1900, $20,000, welcome Mayor

OpenTTD · 1950, in Chinese, mid-game

DOOM · engine ready, bring your own demons

They are not GIFs of games. They are the games, compiled to WebAssembly and running in the same MultiFinder that holds Searcher and Review Desk. They prove the constraint can contain real software; the writing route earns trust separately, through visible objects, deliberate saving, and receipts for what actually happened.

One desk. Twelve systems.

The files and open windows stay put. The whole computer changes era around them.

1988 / SYSTEM 6	1991 / SYSTEM 7	1999 / PLATINUM
2002 / AQUA	2005 / TIGER	2009 / SNOW LEOPARD
2011 / LION	2014 / YOSEMITE	2020 / BIG SUR
2026 / LIQUID GLASS	1995 / NEXTSTEP · BRANCH	1998 / DRAWING BOARD · BRANCH

Twelve frames, one live desktop, captured by npm run site:capture-frames. System 7 and Lion sit on the main 1988-2026 line with the other release eras; NeXTSTEP and Drawing Board stay branches (visible on the site's Other Road scene, never stops on the dissolve). System 6 starts from real System 6.0.8 resources and observed Macintosh behavior; later eras own independent, Retina-ready icon families. Nothing here is a mockup, because a script re-shoots all of it from the running app.

The writing runtime keeps author, recipient, voice and medium independent, shares research while preserving each creator’s firsthand evidence, and keeps article and spoken-video tasks distinct. It preserves explicit author locks through retries, and binds each result to its own source and prompt snapshot. External reviews remain proposals until the writer adopts them; hidden repairs share the task's bounded call allowance. See the writing engineering implementation for behavior checks and the limits of that evidence.

Built under a 1988 constraint

boot-critical payload   stays under the System Floppy Budget: 2,959,872 bytes
two 1.44 MB floppies    2,949,120 bytes of capacity, with a reserve the gate keeps
heavy tools             load lazily, from a third disk

The release gate measures the files needed to start the desktop. Tools that load on demand and AI models are not included in that number. The measured boot payload is 8,177 bytes below the capacity of two floppy disks. The gauge above uses the measured build size.

Bring your own model

Route	Use it for
LM Studio	local chat, embeddings, discovery, model loading
Ollama	local OpenAI-compatible serving
DeepSeek	built-in cloud configuration
Custom endpoint	any compatible provider and model
No model	the desktop and every non-AI tool

Durable project state lives in your browser's IndexedDB. The server is a stateless bridge with no application database. Credentials never enter project files, chats, backups, or exports.

How this repository keeps itself honest

Claims rot. These run from a fresh clone and fail the build instead.

Gate	What it refuses to let happen
verify:floppy	the boot payload growing past two 1.44 MB floppy disks
site:check	this page quoting a byte count the gate never measured
verify:docs	an English document drifting away from its Chinese mirror
verify:public	a command advertised here that fails from a fresh clone

The payload number above is written by npm run verify:floppy itself into site/data/floppy-budget.json; the website fetches it and this page quotes it. On the day that gate was built it caught this README quoting a stale number three times in one afternoon.

Every product screenshot on this page and on the product site is re-shot from the running app by npm run site:capture-frames, npm run site:capture-route, and tooling/capture-site-proofs.mjs. Each of those starts the app and photographs real windows, so there is no art directory of hand-made marketing images to fall out of date — because there are no hand-made marketing images.

How the repository is laid out

AI-System-6/
├── apps/
│   ├── desktop/       browser computer: OS services, apps, styles, assets
│   └── server/        stateless Node.js bridge and model adapters
├── site/              independently deployable product website
├── promo/claude-pop/   film source, scene timing and music tools
├── platform/          macOS shell and web-release contracts
├── tooling/           build, verify, capture, package, release
├── tests/             executable product and architecture contracts
├── docs/              architecture, development, design evidence
└── internal/          maintainer evidence, plans, operations

These are ownership boundaries, not decorative folders: a layout test rejects retired root copies and compatibility symlinks before they can return.

The thirty-six demonstration project disks are one registry, not one file each: tooling/build-shared-project-disks.mjs is the list a third disk has to join, and tests/features/demo-disks-panel.test.mjs is what fails if the list, the Finder row and the site scene disagree.

The Claude-Pop film project contains the film’s source, scene timing and music tools. Generated audio and rendered video are separate files; the source checkout does not include those outputs.

Read Architecture, Development, and the Design Contract.

Contributing

Start with CONTRIBUTING.md, open an issue with a reproducible product contract, or report security problems through SECURITY.md. Every advertised command must work from a fresh clone; the public repository is an independently verifiable source snapshot.

License

MIT. Independent project — not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple Inc.

Third-party code and data keep their own licenses. Time Machine's ad blocking ships uBlock Origin Lite's rule lists as data (GPL-3.0); the licence and provenance are in vendor/ubol/.

_{ONE DISK. TWELVE APPEARANCES. SAME WORK.}

If AI writing tools should leave your voice alone, ★ star AI System 6.

LIVE DESKTOP  ·  BILIBILI FILM  ·  PRODUCT SITE  ·  LATEST RELEASE