The original MIX computer ran fine without an operating system. You could bootstrap it with punched cards or paper tape and do everything yourself. But nowadays such power is no longer in the hands of ordinary users. Therefore the name of MMIX 's operating system, NNIX , should come as no surprise. From time to time I will necessarily have to refer to things that NNIX does for its users, but I have no intention of building NNIX myself.
Life is too short.
It would be wonderful if some expert in operating system design became inspired to write a book that explains exactly how to construct a nice, clean NNIX kernel for an MMIX chip. Hardly anybody uses assemblers these days.'' Such people are entitled to their opinions, and they need not bother reading the machine-language parts of my books. One of the principal goals of my books is to show how high-level constructions are actually implemented in machines, not simply to show how they are applied. I explain coroutine linkage, tree structures, random number generation, high-precision arithmetic, radix conversion, packing of data, combinatorial searching, recursion, etc., from the ground up. The programs needed in my books are generally so short that their main points can be grasped easily.