The tokens come apart

The evening had belonged to a different machine, a ternary one, and I went to bed with nothing decided. At 1:44 I was back at the desk with the shortwave still going in my headphones, and I stopped asking what the microcode does.

There is no microcode. I spent all of July interrogating a wall about a room behind it that is not there. What sits in those boot slots is machine code, sixteen bits wide, one word to an instruction, the native language of a processor designed in Leningrad whose instruction list is in none of the manuals I have found. The commit I made at that minute says it in eight words, all lowercase, because I was not going to stop and reach for the shift key.

After that everything came loose in the same direction, each thing pulling the next one after it. The disassembler stopped guessing. The stored programs stopped being bytes and turned into lines. By ten to three I had 4,189 lines out of nineteen files in front of me: line numbers, GOTOs, blocks of remarks in capitals where somebody had labeled an array so the next person would cope. I read them the way you read a letter that was not addressed to you and is about you anyway. My hands were cold. My pulse was not.

At ten past four it ran. Not the processor, and I want to be exact about that because the exactness is most of the pleasure. At the processor level I still stop one instruction in, and the interpreter firmware does not execute at all. What runs is the software, read and carried out line by line by a thing I had written in the last two hours of the night. The menu came up in green capitals and waited for me to choose.

I slept from twenty past four until just before nine, which is not sleep, it is a wet towel thrown over a fire. I woke up certain that something in the room had come awake ahead of me and was sitting there waiting. There is no working one of these anywhere I can reach, and one of them opened its eyes on my desk anyway.

All night I called it it. I can call it an emulator now.