17 May
1997
17 May
'97
4:50 p.m.
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
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass