[TUHS] Happy Programmers' Day!

John Cowan cowan at mercury.ccil.org
Wed Sep 16 22:54:25 AEST 2015


Greg 'groggy' Lehey scripsit:

> Clearly a reference to Dave H's PDP-8 with its 16 word (24 byte) RIM
> loader.

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 at ccil.org
Uneasy lies the head that wears the Editor's hat! --Eddie Foirbeis Climo



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