I memorized the z80 instruction in hex and would code Basic and data 3E, 15, CD, 00, C0, etc just as if it was readable and wrote many games with that. It was nice income for a 10 year old kid in the 80s and even better after. It does slightly suck more now, but AI does help making it similar; focus on the important parts, not this garbage around it.
No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#22The more sophisticated magazines had CRC codes after every line, so you could know where in the code you has mistyped.
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#23Nothing would get me more frustrated than copying code from a magazine for it to not work because they published something wrong.
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#24The more sophisticated magazines had CRC codes after every line, so you could know where in the code you has mistyped.
Compute!'s Gazette first began offering BASIC programs to type in. These became more elaborate over time, and then they announced a revolutionary concept: they began publishing programs written in machine language, for maximum compactness and performance.
But alongside these machine-language programs, they published a short BASIC editor, and this is how you typed in the machine code. It was all numbers, and the editor program would calculate the CRC, and it could flag typos, so you could re-enter the bad lines. That was way better than arduously entering DATA statements in BASIC, or just having a malfunction because of a typo in those programs.
This stuff was all rather magical for me. At first I didn't even have a storage device. I'd type in short BASIC programs, shut off the machine, and they'd be wiped: gone forever. Of course, with the Commodore computers, there was always an option to purchase cartridge-based software that was durable.
Eventually I had a Datasette cassette recorder, so I could save those programs I'd typed in. It was quite amazing to be able to finally save my own stuff, or the magazine programs.
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#25You can always just use vim, no plugins, and a book. No one said that one must use a fancy IDE and online stuff.
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#26[dead]
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#27Maybe not 80s, but I vaguely remember visual basic 4 having autocomplete...
In 1990, I was using the BRIEF editor on MS-DOS, which was an editor for programmers and which was quite similar to Emacs (also including a scripting language somewhat similar to LISP). BRIEF must have already existed for some years.
It had a completely configurable auto-complete, which I rewrote to insert big code templates in the languages that I was using (C, C++, Fortran, Basic, assembly), covering almost all boilerplate that I encountered at that time.
The BRIEF editor for programmers was one of the best software products that I have ever used. Nothing that I encountered later on Windows approached it in customizability. Actually I find it strange that I cannot recall any Windows program that I would consider as a high-quality software product, while there are a handful of programs for MS-DOS that I consider as examples of high-quality, even decades later (e.g. the programming editor BRIEF, the file manager XTree, the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3, the technical drawing program AutoCAD for MS-DOS; all these were extremely customizable).
Nowadays Emacs may have even more customizable features, but it has always been more opaque for newbies. BRIEF was instantly usable on an IBM PC clone, even if discovering its advanced features could require some time.
Despite having used continuously for 3 decades various UNIX-derived operating systems, including Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux, only this year I have switched to Emacs, in order to recreate the great programming experience that I had with BRIEF many years ago. Emacs includes all that is necessary, but it requires a much longer initial study in comparison with BRIEF, before becoming able to master it, which is why I hesitated for a long time before trying it.
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#28We had SWAG for pascal
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#29[deleted]
> Just last week, I spent several hours reading the rsync C Language source code line-by-line so I could write a custom patch to add nanoseconds to the file creation dates.
Pause
I need to hear about this :)
What is your use case, if you don't mind sharing?
Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
#30Yeah, all the computer science students in the dorms would collaborate on homework assignments, but I was a non-traditional student living in a small home near the college campus, so no interaction on that front, unless no one in the dorms was able to solve something, then I'd get a phone call and would try to coach people through the solution over the phone, or would walk to the lab, printout in hand....
Failed the 301 Systems Programming class because C on my NeXT Cube was sufficiently different from the compiler in the labs and I never managed to work out how to bridge that gap mentally....