[TUHS] Unix Sixth Edition Boot Loader Analyses

Will Senn will.senn at gmail.com
Tue Dec 29 09:24:58 AEST 2015


All,

I just finished some compact analyses on the boot loaders that are 
presented in "Setting up Unix - Sixth Edition" by Thompson and Ritchie. 
They are in followup to the more detailed analysis of the Tape Bootstrap 
Loader that I mentioned previously and the entry is posted here:
http://decuser.blogspot.com/2015/12/pdp-11-bootstrap-loaders-some-analysis.html

What was most interesting about the analyses and programs was how 
related they were. At the end of the day, once I understood how the 
first one worked, the other two were pretty simple and required only 
minor tweaks in the coding to achieve their results.

I am moving on now that I have a pretty good idea of how these bits of 
code work and will be starting to program in Macro-11 for a few weeks to 
get a handle on things before I return to the deep dive into the source 
code of v6 that I temporarily put on hold so I could actually make sense 
of the Assembly bits.

I really appreciate everyone's help, tips, suggestions and even critiques.

Thanks,

Will



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