Good old days

25Mar09

I know, I know, I haven’t written anything for a while now. But today, I’d like to write something nostalgic. For most people this won’t mean anything, for me however it’s a way to rediscover who I really am and where have I started from.

At around 1993, my dad bought our first computer. It was a nice 486 computer, top of the line at the time. As – I think – it happened with everyone, he didn’t let me use it at first. I had dreams of course, like my godfather will write me a new Windows and it’ll be awesome, and stuff like that. Four years had passed when I realized, writing an operating system isn’t an everyday garage project that anyone can make happen in a matter of hours.

My biggest enemy in operating system programming was Assembly. A language, I was told, of the pros, the best of the best. Right. Well I wasn’t one of them at the time, and I’m only a small step towards it ten years later, but finally I took the step (well I had to) and found that Assembly is not that difficult. It took a university course to teach me the true nature of Assembly and the assembly programmer. It’s not the language, it’s the programmer. Writing 50 lines of code isn’t that big of a deal, right? Spending three days reading the microcontroller documentation,  the instruction set, and another two days counting one-s and zero-s to be able to confidently write those 50 lines, well that’s the big deal. I made it eventually, but it’s been a most perplexing experience.

It’s one of those defining experiences. I enjoyed it, from start to end, even though I had my low-points. It was amazing anyway. When you not only think you know what happens, you see that it happens. You follow it bit by bit. You know exactly what’s happening because that’s how it works, and if something goes wrong it’s your fault, and yours only. There are no invisible bugs in the underlying framework, simply because there is no underlying framework. That, I think, is the art and beauty of Assembly.

After such a long and moving discussion of my feelings, let’s turn back to programming operating systems. Long story short, last night I had a beer with some friends celebrating that we almost finished the course. I started thinking about operating system programming again. I was thinking that if that’s Assembly programming, it means that from here on, I might be able to go further on the path to build an operating system for myself. An interesting idea that still needs to be thought over once or twice, but this time Assembly will not be a problem.

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