[Oberon] SD card image and booting

[Paul Reed]

Hi Peter,

> Actually, I don't understand why you don't just use the partition table?
> The code easily fits in the boot loader. Why force the Oberon file
> system to sit in a random location in the middle of the disk?

That's a good question - but why stop there?

It may interest you to know that when I was first getting a system
together on the FPGA, I was using the Oberon-0 compiler from Compiler
Construction to write the bootloader, which was a bit tedious due to the
lack of types (and not even hex!) but it served the purpose: and I even
got the system booted from a file on a FAT partition, which I thought
would be the nicest way to get interoperability (like now on the Raspberry
Pi, as it happens).

But this all comes at the cost of complexity which is pretty irrelevant
for some.  I guess it all depends on your point of view.  The Project
Oberon book is about Project Oberon, not about Master Boot Records or
other arcane things from the PC world (for example, only from that point
of view can you consider a nice round offset to be random!). :)

So the choice was, 0 (ie dedicate the whole disk to Oberon) or some fixed
offset.  I asked for the latter.  It might have been more honest to choose
0.  Please don't kill me. :)

Hope that helps,
Paul