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Christopher Burke
Yes, it is totally possible to program a computer from scratch; I’ve done it many times. Early microcomputers didn’t have a BIOS ROM, and came with nothing but a switch panel and built-in hardware to store numbers into successive memory locations and then run whatever instruction was at address 0x0000.
You’d use the switches to enter a simple paper tape reading program. Then you’d load a more sophisticated program that you’d previously written, from tape. The program on tape might be a disk loader, or it might be a BASIC interpreter, or it might be a very simple operating system. You’d use that to program or to load in something even more sophisticated.
You can try this out yourself by looking online for a PDP-11/20, Altair 8800, or COSMAC ELF (among others) emulator.
Image: MITS Altair 8800
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Yes, it is totally possible to program a computer from scratch; I’ve done it many times. Early microcomputers didn’t have a BIOS ROM, and came with nothing but a switch panel and built-in hardware to store numbers into successive memory locations and then run whatever instruction was at address 0x0000.
You’d use the switches to enter a simple paper tape reading program. Then you’d load a more sophisticated program that you’d previously written, from tape. The program on tape might be a disk loader, or it might be a BASIC interpreter, or it might be a very simple operating system. You’d use that to program or to load in something even more sophisticated.
You can try this out yourself by looking online for a PDP-11/20, Altair 8800, or COSMAC ELF (among others) emulator.
Image: MITS Altair 8800
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...