This is deep nostalgia for me. A bootloader and a toy ... kernel ... were the first things I ever wrote after leaving Apple II BASIC behind.
The local library had no books on anything other than BASIC and assembler. I didn't know what a higher-level language was - never even heard of C or Pascal or anything - I just knew that I didn't seem to be able to do a lot of stuff in BASIC. After a few hours at the library, I thought that assembler was the only option.
And that's how I spent that entire summer. Going over books on assembler that for some reason were in the library of a tiny Mississippi town.
Ralf Brown's Interrupt List made me giddy once I understood exactly what it meant. I still remember that day. It was in some TSR program that I could view while in EDIT.
Next year, I found out about Pascal, pirated a copy of TP(3? 5?) from my friend's dad and didn't touch assembler again until college. But I found the knowledge of how x86 worked useful for many years, even into my first real-world job.
The local library had no books on anything other than BASIC and assembler. I didn't know what a higher-level language was - never even heard of C or Pascal or anything - I just knew that I didn't seem to be able to do a lot of stuff in BASIC. After a few hours at the library, I thought that assembler was the only option.
And that's how I spent that entire summer. Going over books on assembler that for some reason were in the library of a tiny Mississippi town.
Ralf Brown's Interrupt List made me giddy once I understood exactly what it meant. I still remember that day. It was in some TSR program that I could view while in EDIT.
Next year, I found out about Pascal, pirated a copy of TP(3? 5?) from my friend's dad and didn't touch assembler again until college. But I found the knowledge of how x86 worked useful for many years, even into my first real-world job.
God, I'm old.