You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more
Suppose you're a good programmer, who even knows assembly language. As a test, someone sits you down in a plain room with a modern x64 PC. There's no operating system on it. (There's as much of a BIOS as there would need to be to boot it). You have a keyboard and a mouse,
and no other devices. Are you able to bootstrap this PC to the point where it has some user-controlled software, that could be expanded upon by you or anyone else? As far as I know, the answer is no. (I don't know how to do it, unless the BIOS was specially made for this).
What percentage of our computers are we able to program without using other fully-working computers to put the data in? What does this mean for the overall health of the system if there is a disruption, or software quality degrades?
In the minicomputer days, you had a row of switches on the front that you could use to input machine code to get yourself to a state of minimal ability to load more software. We just don't do that any more... https://i1.wp.com/avitech.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/11-70-front-panel-Medium.jpg …
I found this set of tutorials on the topic to be very enlightening:https://github.com/cfenollosa/os-tutorial/blob/master/README.md …
Contrast this with computers like the C16, which could dump you straight into a machine code monitor (single line assembler) on boot. I used that to bootstrap my own little OS once. Wanna insert an instruction? Manually move memory around. Fun times. https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Machine_Code_Monitor …
This is exactly why I plan to do an Open Firmware impl. Similarly Hula is going to be bootstrapped from a simple enough Forth that the Forth is viable to write directly in machine code, I want absolutely no dependency on existing ecosystem, bootstrapping from nothing is important
how you are going to set those bits on a system with no software is a challenge in itself if the hardware isn't designed for this but the first step in that direction is to have the software designed to do it: simple language easy to bootstrap, firmware with bootstrapping in mind
Forth is pretty unreadable but it is ideal for bootstrapping, Open Firmware used Forth and by bootstrapping Hula from Forth, suddenly you've got a C-family language relatively easy to bootstrap from nothing and it can be packaged with the firmware or bootstrapped by hand
As someone else pointed out in reply to the first tweet, with EFI shell, a partirioned & formatted HD, sufficient reference materials, and enough time, yes it is possible. Probably for the first time on x86 PCs since the ROM BASIC days in the 80s. https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/efi-shells-and-scripting …
am i allowed to rework the hardware?
lol learn 2 code noob
Is it possible with an older generation of the IBM PC? Or the 8086 for that matter.
The early IBM PC models had ROM BASIC.
You can't do this on a modern PC, but you could do this on PowerPC Macs, since they had a Forth interpreter in their firmware.
Did the OpenBoot PowerMacs include a break key so that you don't have to reset the machine to recover from an infinite loop? Maybe I'm being overly demanding here but I found the lack of L1-A dispiriting on the OLPC XO
Even if the BIOS was made for this, the amount of documentation required would be a showstopper in itself. Unless the BIOS stands for Big Initialization Operating System, which it probably doesn't :D
For some, this might be hard to discern whether this is quaint nostalgia or an urgent call to arms. Based on Blow’s recent talks, it is the latter.
If it was an MSX, I probably could. I've written games in ASM for it, which is just soft that starts at 0000h. Didn't use the BIOS at all, does that count? On PC... long time since I did anything in ASM (around the 486 era). I still remember 0xA000 as the video address though ;)
While not *exactly* the same, you just reminded me of this very old (2001) project: https://web.archive.org/web/20181020153504/http://www.rano.org/bcompiler.html …
Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS is truly inspiring. I find it amusing to read the phrase "very old (2001)" in a thread that started with a PDP-11 front panel!
Does it have... a hard disk?
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
