I chose the registration “MOI1100” for a number of personal reasons rather than to hide the year of my car…
- The “M” obviously is for “Mark”, and being a big James Bond 007 fan, his boss is “M” in the novels, I thought that this is quite fitting since I own my own IT business and I am the boss.
- The “MOI” is a Belfast number plate from 1978, and my IT business is registered in Ireland.
- If you take away the “M” the rest looks like a binary number, but, not just any binary number, something rather special to me…
This rest of this will now get very nerdy. As you know, I also write software. The binary part of the number is an illegal op code on the original NMOS 6502 CPU chip from the 1970’s. Using the code as a machine code instruction would crash the chip, and the computer. In testing for this, you would have to setup the BRK error vector to recover cleanly. However, in later CMOS versions, this binary number was a TRB instruction, “test and reset bit” and so would not crash. Using this code, you were able to determine if you were using a newer more capable chip, and if so, load a slightly different version of your software in order to take advantage of faster and later more advanced features. It is what I used to do in the 1990’s in my software boot loaders, and this is why “00011100” is special to me. The number plate “MOI1100” is the closest I can get to that op code on a UK number plate.
Mark Smith
“The Rambling Motorist“