> I didn't mean to leave out firesystem functionality entirely. Clearly you still need a way to load programs from the disk without typing in a bootstrap progra

> I didn't mean to leave out firesystem functionality entirely. Clearly you still need a way to load programs from the disk without typing in a bootstrap program! In my mind, if you're going to make assumptions such as having a valid file table, making the assumption you have some basic programs ready to be loaded is not too much of a leap? By the way, once I've got a filesystem up and running that can load in files greater than 512 bytes, it makes sense then to build a very basic assembly compiler. There's a bunch of tricks one could pull in order to make compiling a single parse deal for relatively large files at the sacrifice of efficiency. I think I could quite easily drop support for half of the 8086 instruction set and still end up with something very usable. > I agree that octal is less dense. But it's a lot more readable, because operand fields are isolated in a single digit (usually) and not split across digits and mixed with opcode bits. Are you able to give a small example, I'm not sure I follow the thinking? From what I understand, for each octal character you're representing 3 bits of binary. With two characters you have 6, but you're still short 2 bits for a byte.