Why do PCs load their boot sector at 7C000h linear? (opens in new tab)

I'm not sure which Zones Of Thought book it was (probably Deepness in the Sky), but my favorite software joke in SciFi is when someone deep-diving into the system discovers that at the deepest layers timekeeping is still calculated from the UNIX epoch on the long lost human homeworld.

I wouldn‘t call it software archeology because it is still very much in use and modern standard.

Quoting his comment:

TerryADavis 2 hours ago [dead] http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Adam/Opt/Boot/BootMHD.html http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Adam/Opt/Boot/BootMHD2.html http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Adam/Opt/Boot/BootHD.html

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Thanks, Terry!

Soon the community will be able to selectively un-auto-[dead] comments. We've been working on this for a long time. It's currently in alpha testing, and indeed the alpha-testers (not moderators) unkilled https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10282575, which is precisely the intent of the feature.

Yeah, it's not 7C00:0000, it's 007C:0000 (or 0000:7C00)

shudders

IBM's BIOS put the boot loader at the end of the minimum amount of memory at the time (32KB). 7C00-7DFF get the boot sector, and 7E00-7FFF are scratch space.

Also once upon a time SCP tucked it into 0200-03FF because that ram was otherwise unused.

Do you intentionally leave out parens in the #define for MODULE_SIZE?

If it was used in a context with higher precedence than multiplication, it'd be a bug.