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Comment by mjcohen | Hacker News Reader

Makes me think of the time, many, many, many years go, when I was learning IBM 7090 assembly language (my introduction to computers). The macro assembler was powerful enough that I could check for primality at assembly time.

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This sounds super awesome! I can't imagine how interesting those times might have been. I started to play around with a 6502 just because there is the possibility to understand the system to some extend. Modern day software engineering is like sitting in the golden cage. Not because the the systems are inaccessible like mobile devices or Apple Computers – you can still get pretty far on Linux systems – but the main reason is that you just can fit all the stuff in your brain. If you try to understand how your Angular/React/whatever project is getting their pixels to the screen all the way down – its just a project for a lifetime and even that is not enough. Understanding modern x86 processors is almost impossible – yeah to some degree enough to understand some basic concepts to not shoot yourself in the foot with how the cache works etc. but getting your hands dirty with an 8-bit processor and reading the datasheet is just something very different.

It's not that bad, check out the Serenity OS project (on Youtube).

It is to be honest. I checked out various OS's and being involved in one of them ( Redox OS ). The problem is that this is "just" the OS part. There are multiple layers above and multiple layers below. Understanding the ins and outs of modern processors (pipelining, branch prediction etc.) motherboards pcie, things like coreboot, modern RAM etc. multiple layers of software abstractions until chrome or firefox have rendered the pixels i command with the javascript engine ... that is just humongous compared to a simple 6502 setup where i am able to really understand every aspect, can replace pieces, build things on top (hard and software) .. making my own RAM ... just for fun. Its a different kind of thing.

While the Serenity OS does not address the layers below, it does address layers above, e.g. the browser.

If you have a blog, I would like to read about your experiments!

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