Modern Robinson Crusoe
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Imagine: You are modern Robinson Crusoe stranded on a uninhabited island millions of miles from next human live. No communication possible (no, no you are not allowed to build a radio transmitter). You got a container full with PC hardware. Unfortunatelly you do not have any software. Like said all harddisks are formatted, nothing on them. Sure you got electricity because you could save a emergency generator and tons of gasoline. Also you could save a container full of computer literature. My question is. Can you get one of the PC's working writing an OS from scratch? I mean just having a BIOS? Sincerely Chris ;P -- modified at 23:23 Tuesday 17th January, 2006
I would be more inclined to build a boat. All of the fans from the power supplies could be connected in tandem and powered by the generator. That's probably not any more far-fetched than writing an OS from scratch.
"The words of God are not like the oak leaf which dies and falls to the earth, but like the pine tree which stays green forever." - Native American Proverb
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What is the point if you are not allowed to build a radio transmitter ? You cant even surf for prOn to help you on the island. You really want to forget about the BIOS, work directly with the processor. Step 1: Build a circuit with 32 switches to represent a word. Step 2: Build a circuit to transfer the word corresponding to the switch position to RAM directly via the address & data bus. Step 3: Build a circuit to strobe the address and data by pushing a switch. Step 4: Transfer machine code like this to required addresses. Step 5: Reset processor pin to execute instructions from Program Counter 0.
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dl4gbe wrote:
on a uninhabited island millions of miles from next human live.
To answer your question, yes, but I'd be more concerned with building a rocket ship to get back to earth. Marc Pensieve
Sorry Marc, You do not know modern Robinson personally. He is a programmer. He is happy in the situation he is just now. He does not need women, beer e.t.c. Just food, water, cigarettes and sure a computer with an OS. You know, he worked as a consultant all his live. He is used to fight alone. ;) He can create all the software by himself. He just needs a way to start the supid machine. Sincerely Chris ;) P.S.: I stayed on a lonesome island for over a year. Only one small fishing village. We had a shortwave link using SSB. No internet, no mail. But the weather was nice, the food was good , the inhabitants , a view hundred , nice and friendly (Sea Gypsies) We got beer and smoke. ;P Tons of Coconats. And I had a laptop. Including an operating system. In case I got bored I programmed. ;) We had to send a boat every view days to a neighbouring island to charge my car batteries, which fed my computer and the shortwave. The neighboring island did not have electricity either. But the shop in the village had a generator. ;)