what-happens-when VS Bochs

Agreed!

It reminds me of:

https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

and how many of today’s CS-degree holders would barely understand any of it. As someone who has also “grown up with all the technology”, I’ve learned and experienced all that. But as a percentage of “software engineers”, there’s fewer and fewer that do every day.

There is a pretty comprehensive answer to number 2 here

Ask them to describe what happens when you visit a website and grill them on every layer of abstraction, every implementation detail.

This is a classic interview question and it basically means "How does internet work?" It is great because it allows to check how many levels of understanding it a developer has. The answer may be quite lengthy, for example: https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

Perhaps you will find https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when useful.

The following is a pretty decent historical page about the pre-(U)EFI MBR (Master Boot Record) boot process:

https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/STDMBR.htm

Note that EFI/UEFI -- occurred much later in time than MBR...

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

You might also wish to check out some emulators, most notably Bochs (https://bochs.sourceforge.io/) and QEMU (https://www.qemu.org/) because they simulate the boot process, and if you're in their debuggers, you should be able to inspect that process step by step -- but also more generally emulators for other machines/platforms/architectures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_system_emulat...) -- because in general, most of those emulators should simulate the given machine/platform/architecture's boot process...

With both of those you can make some really nice DOS programs. Which you can then run in bochs (not virtualized, but an emulator. Close enough :) ).

Just took a look myself, check this out: