I'm really digging the systems posts that have been cropping up on HN recently; this and the toy OS post that was floating around are both really interesting.
Funny thing is that they both do basically the same thing, except one is done all in assembly and the other in C.
I would have liked this post to actually discuss the things that a bootloader is meant to do, like switching to 32-bit protected mode and loading the next block of code from the disk.
