Yeah, I was actually thinking the basic behavior that OP mentioned could be quite rare these days. Last project I worked on there was a whole startup procedure.

Yeah, I was actually thinking the basic behavior that OP mentioned could be quite rare these days. Last project I worked on there was a whole startup procedure. You could even use a special bootloader that they kept in ROM, if you wanted... It did a number of other things that were generally not visible to the developer, but probably required some CPU interaction.