I had the privilege of taking two classes with Dr Shapiro while I was in undergrad. The second class revolved around a related operating system named Coyotos. One of the most memorable classes was a 3 hour session where we worked through the boot sequence step by step [1]. The single lecture helped us all appreciate the delicate dance to bring up an x86 processor, a history lesson in the various features that had been bolted onto x86 over time, and a bunch of helpful debugging tips when your options are limited (it prints "Co" "yo" and "tos" in different stages!).

This was easily one of my most memorable lectures from undergrad, and it really helped to show me that even your operating system is just more software that you can read and understand.

1. https://github.com/vsrinivas/coyotos/blob/c68719b851e253aa11...

I was a nerdy kid living in the middle of nowhere in Africa. I think we’d had dialup for about 2 years at that, and I emailed him with some questions about how to understand the mathematical notations used in his EROS work. He was very kind and helpful in his response, even though my questions were probably very naive.

Coyotos and CapROS are two continuations of EROS.

CapROS is a literal successor taking the EROS source code and continuing development. Coyotos is more of a spiritual successor, a redesign of the core OS but in the same spirit.

I very much appreciate the correction/clarification.

Dr Shapiro has "open to work" on his LinkedIn right now, FWIW. Don't know what kind of work he's interested in today.

I followed his work on bitc for a while (it was his alternative to rust).

I'm sorry that you're having to go through this. Good luck sorting out your account access.

I actually got hit by something that sounds very similar back in July. I was saved by my DNS settings where "npNjs dot com" wound up on a blocklist. I might be paranoid, but it felt targeted and was of a higher level of believability than I'd seen before.

I also more recently received another email asking for an academic interview about "understanding why popular packages wouldn't have been published in a while" that felt like elicitation or an attempt to get publishing access.

Sadly both of the original emails are now deleted so I don't have the exact details anymore, but stay safe out there everyone.