On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Piers Hemy wrote:
>
> Ahh, those were the days, when you could fit an OS into, what, 180k of disk
> space?
Original 8" floppies had 80K of storage. That storage was used for the
processor microcode, not the OS. The microcode is the raw bit sequences
used to flip the latches in the processor to implement the instruction set.
It wasn't uncommon for a new release of the OS to come with new microcode
which implemented some fancy new instructions needed by the new OS. I don't
think any modern processor is microcode loadable any more, they're all hard
wired nowdays.
-mark
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