Pushing the limits of floppy disk boot sectors: sectorLISP
Channel: The Oldskool PC
Date: 2021-12-20

In which Jim muses endlessly about the IBM PC, boot sectors, writing boot sector assembly code, and cramming all sorts of things into boot sectors that have absolutely no business being there.

Chapters:

00:00 Boot sectors are neat!
02:11 Anatomy of a boot sector
04:32 How to program a boot sector
06:32 Writing a boot sector to disk
07:29 An introduction to Lisp and sectorLISP
09:16 Testing sectorLISP on vintage hardware
12:01 Trivia and thanks

CORRECTIONS:

At 8:00 I mistakenly say "Forth" instead of Fortran!  I had "forth" on the brain all throughout making the video because I covered "sectorforth".  Apologies.  Fortran is considered the oldest usable/practical HLL.

References:
A detailed write-up on SectorLISP: https://justine.lol/sectorlisp2/
SectorLISP github/source: https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp
Thanks to The Starman’s Realm for permission to use text and diagrams from their website: https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/STDMBR.htm
Git repo with the boot sector source code and batch files used in this video: https://github.com/MobyGamer/x86-simple-boot-sector
SectorForth: https://github.com/cesarblum/sectorforth
"BootProg" EXE/COM Loader v 1.5 by Alexey Frunze: https://github.com/alexfru/BootProg
DONKEY bootsector: https://int10h.org/blog/2016/08/happy-35th-birthday-ibm-pc/
Toledo Chess: https://nanochess.org/chess6.html, https://github.com/nanochess/Toledo-Atomchess
Some of the best 256-byte intros: https://www.pouet.net/lists.php?which=152
John McCarthy’s original LISP paper: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6096/AIM-008.pdf
A brief overview of LISP: https://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs1104/TowerOfBabel/LISP/Lisp.outline.html

#DOScember2021

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Contact info:
Twitter: @MobyGamer
Email: http://www.oldskool.org/personal