Magazine retrospectives

From: Sam Ismail <dastar_at_crl.com>
Date: Sat May 17 23:50:39 1997

On Sat, 17 May 1997, Tim Shoppa wrote:

> For comparison, my S-100 boxes with WD1771-derived controllers have
> bootstraps that are just over a dozen bytes long. For many
> PDP-11 disk devices, the bootstrap is only a couple words. When
> you have to toggle the bootstrap in through the front panel every
> time you boot, a short bootstrap is extremely desirable. Of
> course, in these cases, there is substantially more intelligence
> in the device and controller than there is in the Disk ][.

Exactly. The Apple ][e bootstrap does a lot of work to read the boot
sector off the disk. It creates the 6&2 encoding table, looks for the
boot sector and reads it, decodes it and then jumps to it, all in less
than 256 bytes. Impressive as all hell. Woz is a god damn GOD.

Sam
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Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass
Received on Sat May 17 1997 - 23:50:39 BST