On Thursday 13 February 2003 13:24, Frank Robers _ SOTL wrote:
> YES! At least there was once upon a time.
> In fact once up on a time there was no bios.
> But I believe that a higher level of thought might be appropriate here.
>
> As far as BIOS is concerned that was a new term I had to learn when I
> returned to playing with computers after a 20 year absence. Drove me nuts
> until I figured out that a modern chip computer is really not one computer
> but a large number of "simple computers" simply transferring data from one
> input buss to another.
You may be a bit *too* advanced to get a true "newbie" feel when it comes to
general computing. Not that his is a bad thing ;)
> Sorry don't mean to be rude but most modern day computer engineers have a
> very limited of what an old "simple computer" was since these concept have
> been shrunk so far down on chips whose complexity has expanded to such a
> level that the very essence of a '50s or 60s era computer has long since
> been obsoleted.
I started on a C64 writing ML and macro assembler - an 8bit 6502. Sure, it
wasn't a 4bit 4040 or some such arcane piece of hardware, but it *did*
bootstrap using the FFFE/FFFF cold-start initialization vector in ROM. I
walked that Basic ROM and Kernel ROM backward and forward - inside and out.
My past is in Demo/Intro coding way back then. Understanding the power of
dedicated I/O processing hardware (CIA/PIA, VIC, SID, etc) and how to use
those devices properly really forced me to *understand* how the machine
worked. After writing a half-dozen 1541 fast loaders (and embedded code
thereon) as well as hand-wiring a 1571 SRQ pin to a PIA for "burst mode" to
the hardware UART contained therein.. THAT was fun stuff. Back in the day ;)
Today, all of that hardware is emulated virtually perfectly via Frodo/VICE on
a far more complex piece of software (Unix). Away from the day where a 64K
compressed demo *needed* a "fast loader" to load from a 180k GCR 5 1/4 floppy
drive. Today, that same 64k is barely a disk sector.
> No, I don't expect to start with Unix running on computers which have bit
> card made from discrete transistors components and core memory or a course
> in modern day chip design but it would be beneficial to start on a much
> simpler plain for us non computer experts.
But you understand the raw iron from back in the day. I simply can't point you
at 80 lines of code and say "there, see, that's how it boots". It's too
complex. Most users will never understand your basic view of the hardware -
heck, most programmers today coming through school simply have no clue.
> What I feel is a presentation on basic modern day Linux in a simple
> framework from which more advanced presentations may bill on.
I agree.
-- - Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net>(This message bound by the following: http://www.nks.net/email_disclaimer.html)
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