Ah, memories. One of the biggest challenges we faced in porting Unix to the Interdata 8/32 was starting to do everything in hex. I can truly say that I learned it by single-stepping through bootstrap code and reading the panel lights... As a friend of mine once said to a young programmer "I've written boot loaders with fewer bytes than you use for variable names!"

Greg 'groggy' Lehey scripsit: The RK8E bootstrap for OS/8 was even shorter: just two instructions. The first loaded a block from the disk (you forced it to be block 0 loaded at address 0 of field 0 by using the CLEAR key on the front panel first), and the second was jump-to-self, which executed until the disk overwrote it with code that waited until the block had been loaded and then continued executing the newly loaded code. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org Uneasy lies the head that wears the Editor's hat! --Eddie Foirbeis Climo