Some people get surprised and upset when the internet (or a computer) breaks. I know a bit about how it works, and I'm more astonished that it ever works at all.

This stream is mostly to collect links that try to elaborate on that.

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One I hadn't seen before that prompted me to start this stream on unbreaking memory addressing during system boot:
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/kbd/A20.html

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And this one's a classic (what happens when you open Google's home page, or any website, really): https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/dfydM2Cnepe

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Large chunks of Matthew Garrett's blog also qualify, but this one on booting from a live USB is impressive in the insanity of the tower of complexity:
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/4957.html

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If I'm feeling masochistic some day, maybe I'll do a walkthrough of the madness that is the startup sequence inside the CPython interpreter...