On 2016-04-02 04:00, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:

On Saturday,  2 April 2016 at  1:06:58 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:

On Mon, 28 Mar 2016, scj@yaccman.com wrote:

...  and I once heard an old-timer growl at a young programmer "I've
written boot loaders that were shorter than your variable names!"

Ah, the 512-byte boot blocks...  We got pretty inventive in those days
(and this was before secondary loaders!) with line editing etc.

I was thinking more of the RIM loader on the PDP-8.  16 words or 24
bytes.

Bah! The RK8E bootloader for OS/8: 2 words... :-)