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It was one of those shows that I was watching and really enjoying then other things got in the way and never finished the last third of the season. I'm going to
by icpmacdo 12y ago
It was one of those shows that I was watching and really enjoying then other things got in the way and never finished the last third of the season. I'm going to catchup right after schools done next week.
How accurate is it when they reverse engineer the computer at the beginning of the season?
- gjkood 12y agoDuring the reverse engineering scene I would assume that they are reading the BIOS which would have been stored in ROM (Read Only Memory). The ROM chip would have the same address and read control lines like any standard memory chip which could be read by setting the Address lines, the Memory Read, any additional/ancillary signaling and then reading the data lines. Once you had all the bytes read, you could in principle run this through a Disassembler to get the actual Assembly language instructions (minus any original comments). You would have to figure out the boundaries of code, data etc. I would assume in those early days, they wouldn't expect the run of the mill hackers to be able to disassemble the stored data in ROM.
- waterlesscloud 12y agoYou could just read the rom in 8 bit home computers using normal memory access, and then disassemble it. I dunno about run of the mill hackers, but plenty of people would read the code for "fun".
- WalterBright 12y agoThe Technical Reference Manual for the original IBM PC included a listing of the source code to the BIOS.
- odiroot 12y agoIt was done on purpose, just to make it harder (sic!) to do IBM-clones, due to legal not technical reasons. Cringely explains that in his Accidental Empires.