Top all-time · #267
pagetable.com
Personal blog · pagetable.comsystemshardwarehistory
pagetable.com is a personal blog at pagetable.com about systems, hardware and history. Since 2007, 183 different Hacker News readers have linked it 381 times, most often “How MOS 6502 Illegal Opcodes really work”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Michael Steil's pagetable.com mostly as a source for 8-bit and x86 history, such as Microsoft BASIC, the 6502 and the C64. A few commenters call the blog awesome and recommend specific articles.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Called awesome and a nice overview; C64 talk 'amazing'; two articles to read; Skype post a favourite; analysis believed
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Some Assembly Required
Most-linked posts?
- How MOS 6502 Illegal Opcodes really work11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2010-11-21
- Bill Gates's Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC (2008)9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-03-18
- How MOS 6502 Illegal Opcodes Work (2008)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2018-03-10
- Microsoft Basic for 6502 Original Source Code (1978)8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2018-04-27
- 1200 Baud Archeology: Reconstructing Apple I BASIC from a Cassette Tape5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2008-07-14
- The 6502 in "The Terminator" (2009)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-04-13
- Bill Gates' Easter Eggs in 8bit BASIC5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2008-09-30
- How many Commodore 64 computers were sold? (2011)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-11-06
- C64 basic and kernal ROM disassembly4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-08-11
- The story of 15 Second Copy for the C-64 (Mike Pall's followup to FCopy)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-07-18
What Hacker News says?
For SYSENTER: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1710 Another example: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=27 This is just what is public.
Comment linking /?p=27
on “Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub”Submitted Microsoft BASIC for 6502 – Original Source Code (1978) as a story · 250 points
HN discussionThere's a fine tradition of this, especially at early Microsoft. It's documented here: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=43 , and includes hidden messages that Gates allegedly added himself to prove that code the company licensed could still be traced back to him. (I hit the Ric Weiland one mentioned on my first computer, the Ohio Superboard II - https://www.pagetable.com/?p=43#:~:text=the%201977/1978-,Ohi... ). This was…
Comment linking /?p=43
on “Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30? (2017)”Submitted Way to Play Super Mario 64: On Apple Vision Pro as a story · 233 points
HN discussionBillG claims Paul did most of the emulator work and he worked on the interpreter core. With the floating point routines by Monte Davidoff who they hired. It was a team effort of course, but BillG was adamant to take credit for the interpreter specifically. From the source code itself: PAUL ALLEN WROTE THE NON-RUNTIME STUFF. BILL GATES WROTE THE RUNTIME STUFF. MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE. https://www.pageta…
Comment linking /?p=774
on “Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness”Submitted Xhyve – Lightweight Virtualization on OS X Based on Bhyve as a story · 226 points
HN discussionMichael Steil at pagetable.com wrote an article about how this easter egg was done across different versions of Microsoft BASIC. https://www.pagetable.com/?p=43 Bill Gates showed up in the comments :-)
Comment linking /?p=43
on “If Looks Could Kill”Submitted Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser as a story · 163 points
HN discussionFun fact, GW-BASIC was a descendant of the original Altair BASIC. The "Translation created 10-Feb-83" headers on each source file refer to tooling Microsoft had that automatically translated the 8080 assembly to 8086 (it shouldn't be taken as a build date since they were manually modified after that point). Besides GW-BASIC, source code for the 6502 and 6809 rewrites of Microsoft BASIC were available up to this poin…
Comment linking /?p=774
on “Microsoft’s original source code”Submitted Using the OS X 10.10 Hypervisor Framework: A Simple DOS Emulator as a story · 162 points
HN discussionThere is some research on this http://www.pagetable.com/docs/libcpu/26C3-libcpu.pdf It's a very interesting topic. It may be our best chance at preserving software.
Comment linking /docs/libcpu/26C3-libcpu.pdf
on “Statically Recompiling NES Games into Native Executables with LLVM and Go”Submitted Why is my TI-99/4A in Black and White? as a story · 140 points
HN discussionhttps://www.pagetable.com/?p=901 Commodore C64 hacked 80x25 mode using 4x8 font.
Comment linking /?p=901
on “Creep – a pretty sweet 4px wide pixel font”Submitted Dumping MiniDisc Media as a story · 134 points
HN discussionPrecalcing the entire thing and delivering absolutely nothing but a bunch of print statements is certainly an option that's completely in the spirit of the kinds of stuff one does to speed up an 8-bit computer(1) but the toy problem of "how can I speed up this for-next loop and the various logic inside it" was more fun. :) (also the spaces-instead-of-newlines choice was made so as to avoid scrolling the screen, the…
Comment linking /c64ref/c64disasm/
on “Programming with Less Than Nothing”Submitted Bill Gates's Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC (2008) as a story · 129 points
HN discussion[ Z00M! ] https://www.pagetable.com/?cat=18
Comment linking /?cat=18
on “The 100 MHz 6502”Submitted Visualizing Commodore 1541 Disk Contents as a story · 126 points
HN discussionIt's a couple thousand gates or so You're around an order of magnitude off. It's 3.5K transistors, and slightly less than half of those are NMOS pullups, with many of the gates containing 2-3 or more transistors, so it's less than 1K gates. That of course depends on what you count as a "gate", since many of them are compound-gates like AND-OR-INVERTs and there's also transmission-gate logic too. The decode PLA also…
Comment linking /?p=401
on “The MOnSter 6502”Submitted Commodore 64 BASIC inside a USB Connector as a story · 124 points
HN discussionHere he is making a comment on an article about 8-bit BASIC: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43&cpage=2#comment-103039 "This history is SURPRISINGLY accurate. Rick Weiland and I (Bill Gates) wrote the 6502 BASIC." (that whole blog is awesome if you're into 8-bit CPU's, by the way, and who isn't?).
Comment linking /?p=43&
on “Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant”Submitted How many Commodore 64 computers were really sold? (2011) as a story · 123 points
HN discussionThe Hypervisor framework was released in Yosemite (macOS 10.10). Nice overview of it here < https://www.pagetable.com/?p=764> . There is a (basic) but free implementation xhyve.xyz < https://github.com/machyve/xhyve> which can be used to run various hosts. I know several folks that run Linux so they can use various FPGA development tools to remotely display X windows on the Mac using XQuartz.
Comment linking /?p=764>
on “macOS Kernel Extensions are officially deprecated”Submitted Compiling the Original Commodore 64 KERNAL Source as a story · 108 points
HN discussionhttps://www.pagetable.com/?p=25
Comment linking /?p=25
on “Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel”Submitted The Intel 80376 – A legacy-free i386 with a twist (2010) as a story · 102 points
HN discussion"Recently revealed" is more like a confirmation of what I had read many years before; and furthermore, that Intel's 64-bit x86 would've been more backwards-compatible and better-fitting than AMD64, which looks extremely inelegant in contrast, with several stupid missteps like https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1216 (the comment near the bottom is very interesting.) If you look at the 286's 16-bit protected mode and then t…
Comment linking /?p=1216
on “Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel”Submitted Archiving C64 Tapes Correctly as a story · 99 points
HN discussionThere's this kind of unintended effects all over the place in tech. A particularly interesting one for programmers might be the M6502 CPU. All opcodes on the M6502 are 8 bits. Due to the way it was implemented in order to keep transistor count low, various patterns will trigger specific functionality at specific stages of execution (you can find a javascript emulation of it that displays the execution in excruciatin…
Comment linking /?p=39
on “Pokemon Yellow hack recodes the game from within”Submitted Why is there no CR1, and why are control registers such a mess anyway? (2010) as a story · 99 points
HN discussion
