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In chapter 2 of the tutorial, he mentions Commodore DOS as being an OS which resides in ROM (read only memory), which means it's definitely possible. I'm just
by renlo 10y ago
In chapter 2 of the tutorial, he mentions Commodore DOS as being an OS which resides in ROM (read only memory), which means it's definitely possible. I'm just a laymen but I'd wager that there are some cases where this is still done.
- yoo1I 10y agoBut that's still just software stored in a ROM chip. I think what he meant was implementing the actual logic in silicon. Something like a hardwired CPU. I'm not aware of such a machine.
- PeCaN 10y agoIntel i432 had some of that (capabilities, garbage collection, multitasking, etc) but was crippled by a variety of problems—perhaps most of all that it was quite slow and expensive. It was originally intended to run a Smalltalk-like language, the name of which escapes me at the moment, but got retrofitted to run Ada. Unfortunately the Ada compiler for the i432 was awful, in addition to the slow hardware. It was a pretty fascinating idea though.
- ben_bai 10y agoFPGA? ASIC? Sure it's possible, but really only done in highly specialized environments, like bitcoin mining.