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My guess is...

...that even though IBM published the BIOS as printed assembler source code, it was copyrighted and just hand-transcribing it would have been illegal.

(The principal value of the listing was it was the most certain way of getting the register contents right for BIOS interrupts--no open(), read(), write() stuff back then--no high-level languages at all. Programming was done in assembler code. To do file operations you set values in the 8086 hardware registers and issued an "int 21h." The display was controlled by doing stuff with int 10h, etc. (One of the operations you could do to one of the early IBM displays resulted in stopping the CRT horizontal sweep. This in turn applied a DC voltage across the flyback transformer--essentially a dead short--resulting in a lot of smoke. It was called the "Halt and Catch Fire" instruction.))

Posted by: Henry Miller   Posted on: 10/01/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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