[squeak-dev] Re: The solution of (Was: Creating an image from first principles)

K. K. Subramaniam subbukk at gmail.com
Mon Aug 11 14:54:07 UTC 2008


On Saturday 09 Aug 2008 4:03:48 pm Klaus D. Witzel wrote:
> > I can understand why someone may not wish to go so far into the past  
> > that they
> > cross the point of singularity (when the first image came into  
> > existence).
>
> Odds are that you will never achieve this: take an arbitrary computer  
> system, with nothing on disk and nothing in memory after power on. You're  
> allowed to choose one with the most convenient instruction set ever  
> created on this our planet.
I have done this on a computer (that looked somewhat like Altair 8800) in the 
early 80s. All it had was a bank of LEDs and toggle switches (for address and 
data input). On power-up, I had to load a small tapeloader program using the 
switch bank to setup the i/o subsystem and then read in the rest of the code 
from a paper-tape. Then I could enter commands on a teletypewriter (tty) to 
bootstrap the rest of the environment. There was no disk, so a power failure 
or brownout would put me back in square one.

I know first hand what Alan Kay means when he avers, 'hardware is software 
frozen too soon'. To me, the most interesting transition is the one where we 
move from a VM to VM+image.

Subbu



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