MIKBUG is a

ROM Rom, or ROM may refer to: Biomechanics and medicine * Risk of mortality, a medical classification to estimate the likelihood of death for a patient * Rupture of membranes, a term used during pregnancy to describe a rupture of the amniotic sac * ...

monitor Monitor or monitor may refer to: Places * Monitor, Alberta * Monitor, Indiana, town in the United States * Monitor, Kentucky * Monitor, Oregon, unincorporated community in the United States * Monitor, Washington * Monitor, Logan County, Wes ...

from

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 and had been named Motorola since 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been ...

for the

Motorola 6800 The 6800 ("''sixty-eight hundred''") is an 8-bit microprocessor designed and first manufactured by Motorola in 1974. The MC6800 microprocessor was part of the M6800 Microcomputer System (later dubbed ''68xx'') that also included serial and parall ...

8-bit microprocessor. It is intended to "be used to debug and evaluate a user's program". MIKBUG was distributed by Motorola in 1974 on a 1 K ROM chip part number MCM6830L7. It occupied 512 bytes on the chip, where the remainder was occupied by a 256 byte MINIBUG monitor—a stripped-down version of MIKBUG—and a 256 byte "test pattern" (really just a different and unused revision of MINIBUG). It requires 128 bytes of

random-access memory Random-access memory (RAM; ) is a form of Computer memory, electronic computer memory that can be read and changed in any order, typically used to store working Data (computing), data and machine code. A random-access memory device allows ...

for operation. Its functionality was similar to other monitors of the early microcomputer era, such as the

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

MON-80 for the

Intel 8080 The Intel 8080 is Intel's second 8-bit computing, 8-bit microprocessor. Introduced in April 1974, the 8080 was an enhanced successor to the earlier Intel 8008 microprocessor, although without binary compatibility.'' Electronic News'' was a week ...

. MIKBUG is initiated when power is first applied to the system, or when the system RESET button is pressed. It assumes the presence of a terminal that the user will use to issue commands.

List of commands and functions

Callable functions include input and output of a character on the terminal, input and output of a byte in

hexadecimal Hexadecimal (also known as base-16 or simply hex) is a Numeral system#Positional systems in detail, positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of sixteen. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using ten symbo ...

format, print a string terminated by EOT, and terminate the current program and return control to MIKBUG. MIKBUG allows the user to install an

interrupt handler In computer systems programming, an interrupt handler, also known as an interrupt service routine (ISR), is a special block of code associated with a specific interrupt condition. Interrupt handlers are initiated by hardware interrupts, software ...

using the M command to specify the handler address. Listings of MIKBUG and MINIBUG monitors are available online.

References

{{Reflist, refs= {{cite book , author-last1=Wiles , author-first1=Mike , author-last2=Felix , author-first2=Andre , title=Engineering Note 100 – MCM6830L7 MIKBUG/MINIBUG ROM , date=1973 , publisher= Motorola Semiconductor Products Inc. , url=http://www.bitsavers.org/components/motorola/6800/Engineering_Note_100_MCM6830L7_MIKBUG_MINBUG_ROM_Jul77.pdf , access-date=July 11, 2022 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220819212521/http://www.bitsavers.org/components/motorola/6800/Engineering_Note_100_MCM6830L7_MIKBUG_MINBUG_ROM_Jul77.pdf , archive-date=2022-08-19 (24 pages) {{cite magazine , author-last=Rathkey , author-first=John , title=A MIKBUG Roadmap... , magazine=

BYTE The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

, issn= , publisher= BYTE Publications Inc. , publication-place=Peterborough, New Hampshire, USA , date=February 1977 , number=2 , volume=2 , pages=96–99 , url=https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-02/page/n97 , access-date=July 11, 2022 Motorola microprocessors Microcomputer software