I was a teenage programmer before teenage programmers were cool

I was a teenage programmer before teenage programmers were cool
zdnet.com

Non computer people always talk about the IO as being "the computer" so I found it odd he went on about the IO devices and not the architecture despite being a computer guy. Probably intentionally writing to his audience of the general public about being "us" rather than writing to "us" about being "us".

The article goes on about learning assembly on the PDP-8e... I did some stuff on 8's and its important to note that its not like learning intel or motorola or PIC or BAS (from a mainframe) ... its a weird cross between being really RISC and kinda CISC. Only "about" 6 instructions makes it kinda a turing tarpit but add a layer of dozens of IOT I/O instructions and some weird features like a stretch of memory that autoincremented when you accessed it, and its really a pretty nice platform to be educated in assembly. Its useless as training of course, but pretty good as an education. DEC also had awesome manuals, at least for the time. "Programmers handbook for the -8E". I believe I still have a yellowing copy at home as a memento.

You can tell he's writing to "the general public" instead of us another way because to "us" the weirdest part about assembly on the -8 was it was octal, from the days before hex took everything over. The heathkit H8 was a 8080 machine (from memory?) you programmed traditionally in octal, but you could yank the S100 bus 8080 out and replace it with a Z80 that was almost binary compatible but that was entering the era where everyone used hex, so you had a octal box you programmed in octal which you could upgrade but then had to program in hex which I never really got over. Then I switched to motorola products and got horribly spoiled. Someday someone will make a CPU architecture as perfect as the 6809 but probably not anytime soon.