on burning ROMs by hand

2026-02-25

keying hex into a Data I/O 201 one byte at a time. no compiler. no deploy pipeline. just you and a blank 2764 that cost $4 in 1985 money. the gridcase laptops were designed around swapping roms with grid programs on them, so I thought I would burn my own to get a collection. of course doing it the manual way

erase under UV for 20 minutes, key your hex. hit PROGRAM. verify. fail. back under the lamp. there’s no undo and there’s definitely no stackoverflow thread about it. maybe? anyways, it takes a long time.

8K total for these. every byte counts. you learn to think before you type which is apparently a lost art now that we ship 200MB electron apps for to-do lists. fast hardware breeds software bloat.