Humble Beginnings

Going into university, I had a decent amount of coding experience and had built a few larger projects. Yet, nagging questions kept surfacing—ones that Python, Java, or even C++ couldn’t quite answer satisfactorily. For one, how does a computer take a program in English, and break it down into machine code. For that matter, what even is machine code! I yearned to understand these ideas, and so I turned to the internet in search of answers.

Beneater is a YouTuber whose content revolves around electronics, computer architecture, and networking in a remarkably approachable way. His 6502 project immediately caught my attention, in which he, over the course of 10 videos, walks through the steps to turn a simple 40-pin CPU, into a fully functioning computer, that eventually prints “Hello, World!” on an LCD.

Beneater's Computer printing "Hello, World for the first time!

But the real turning point came when Ben hooked up a UART interface and terminal and, using Steve Wozniak’s Apple II BIOS WOZMON, was able to directly interface with the computer. A flood of possibilities entered my mind. What projects could I create for this machine? Every day in class, I imagined how each problem could be solved on the 6502. A sandbox, with complete control and understanding over every facet of the program. At this point, I knew I needed to go further…

A picture of my version of the computer running WOZMON!