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by k8svet 934 days ago
Read the readme, consider myself a mostly-not-total-idiot. Would buy author a beer to add a whole two sentences to illuminate what wozman is. If it's just that niche and I'm ignorant feel free to ignore me.
6 comments

Ben Eater has a number of very informative videos on Wozmon on YouTube - what it is, how it works and and getting it to work on a home built 6502 machine, literally stepping through the assembly:

Running Apple 1 software on a breadboard computer (Wozmon) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlLCtjJzHVI

How Wozniak’s code for the Apple 1 works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpG8rgI7Hec

Adapting WozMon for the breadboard 6502 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M8LvMtdcgY

This might be helpful… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpG8rgI7Hec

I find it a little weird that these comments always come up on hackernews… if you type "wozmon" in your URL bar and hit enter to search, pretty much _all_ the results are pertinent and helpful.

The source code[1] has a better intro:

> A complete instruction by instruction rewrite of Steve Wozniak's system monitor from 1976 for the Apple-1

I found a nice intro to Wozmon here: https://www.sbprojects.net/projects/apple1/wozmon.php

To add to your suggestion for the README: if this is indeed an "instruction by instruction rewrite" then it would also be helpful to include a canonical link to the original 6502 source. (Found a version here: https://gist.github.com/nobuh/1161983)

[1] https://github.com/IanSeyler/wozmon_x86-64/blob/main/src/woz...

It's the boot ROM that came with the Apple I. It was pretty big for the time given that in those days, computers didn't come with flash, so you had to bootstrap programs with dip switches and the like. The Apple I came with wozmon on ROM, which provided a (VERY) minimal prompt to edit/view memory and run programs from it.
> so you had to bootstrap programs with dip switches and the like

For more on this, check out this amazing series of videos from deramp5113 about the Altair 8800: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB3mwSROoJ4KLWM8KwK0c...

(Also available on archive.org: https://archive.org/search?query=altair+8800&sort=title&and%... )

Good point! I've added some text about wozmon to the README.
It's a monitor by Steve (woz)niak.

Self explanatory really!