Dude wrote in pen . We are not worthy, brothers and sisters. We are not worthy.
As did most of my EE brethren in school in 2009. Trust me, writing code in pen does not a master programmer necessarily make.
How I coded in 1985
51–60 of 120 posts
Re: How I coded in 1985
#52I remember playing around with machine instructions on the 6502. I wouldn't call it hand assembly; it was more like copying and groping around. I probably wrote less than 200 lines in my life. But what a neat feeling! There's something about putting in these numerical codes and seeing a graphical result that I haven't experienced since then. Yes, higher-level languages rock, but dang, this is coding next to the metal…
I know that feeling. My undergrad CS course had a rigorous electronics component where we coded in ASM for the 8086. One of my fondest moments of that time was when I wrote a program that would split the terminal screen into two halves of different color, and display what you typed on one side and the inverse case on the other. This could probably be done with less than 50 lines in python, but doing it in assembly, c…
Wasn't it? And for that moment, you could look out and imagine "Damn, I could code the whole freaking thing like this!"
Then you realize it would take around 30 years, but still -- it was doable. You finally figured out how it all worked. You could make the computer do anything it was capable of doing. There was no more mystery there.
Fun stuff.
Re: How I coded in 1985
#53As a relatively new (5 or so years experience) programmer, 1985 sounds like hell.
Re: How I coded in 1985
#54I have fond memories of programming my "Arnesh" 68 K board around 1995. We used them in our microprocessor course, and since I had so little time in the lab, I bought my own board. After the class ended I would lend it to friends until it came back fried. One of these days I need to dig it out and try to repair it, now that I feel a little more secure with a soldering iron.
Re: How I coded in 1985
#55That headline got me to thinking... Date: Monday, April 29, 1985 Age: 29 Location: Santa Ana, California. Company: electronics manufacturer setup: dumb black & green 24x80 14" CRT terminal Hardware: Honeywell mini OS: Honeywell proprietary DBMS: Pick (Ultimate Flavor) Language: BASIC App: Work Order Processing (I wrote from scratch.) Date: Monday, April 29, 2013 Age: 57 Location: Miami, Florida Company: aerospace man…
I'm wondering, is the dialect and feature set of the BASIC you use now the same as the one you used back then? I imagine the largest factor in that list is the language.
I commonly have to code in older versions of my preferred language, and it's always a bit grating. I'm always pining for the newer features that I've grown accustomed to.
Re: How I coded in 1985
#56Dude wrote in pen . We are not worthy, brothers and sisters. We are not worthy.
i agree, you have to give serious props for that. anytime i write any kind of prototyping/design sketch in pen, it gets all scratched up and crossed out..
Re: How I coded in 1985
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I saved a lot of stuff: http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/in-which-i-switch-on-30-year-old...
I am just beginning to worry about this sort of thing (#) but what age were you in 1979/82 with your sharp computer, and I have assumed I will be trying to guide my son / daughter onto emulators (nand2tetris etc) rather than real physical machines - or are there real physical machines which are simple enough and have root on to be early hacking machines? (#) https://github.com/lifeisstillgood/importantexperiments4kid…
I gave my daughters TRS 80 model 100 computers for their tenth birthdays. It has a 8085 processor and really a quite powerful basic (the last software bill gates worked on, and its not bad) with a bit mapped display. They run for weeks on 4 Aa batteries and have a better keyboard than most modern laptops. here is an emulator available, but since they go for about $30 on eBay, I like having the real thing.
Re: How I coded in 1985
#58Finally, some programming this old fart recognises. Why did it all get so complicated? Yeah, I know. Rose tinted and all that.
> Why did it all get so complicated? Two words: 'the web'. Slightly longer: we're re-inventing the wheel through a very roundabout path, I think right now we've gone back in time to roughly the mainframe area, it won't be long before someone will invent the mini computer all over again only this time it will be a local cluster in a box. Next after that the PC, a 'personal cluster' with a few 100 nodes the size of the…
I don't think it was the web. The pre-web applications with GUI clients running on PCs and servers on mainframes were already pretty complicated (remember Microsoft's ever-changing object APIs, or CORBA?). What made things increasingly complicated was the ever-growing power of computer and communication hardware, which made it possible to create larger and more complex systems. If you're limited by having to run your software on a machine with a total of 256K of memory (like the first machine I used Unix on in 1980), you just can't build something as complex as what you can build today on a cheap laptop.
Re: How I coded in 1985
#59This is neat stuff, but it also shows how far behind some schools can be in technology. Yes, I did the hex-keypad-assembler-in-your-head thing, but, by 1985 there were far better options. One word:
Forth
The machine had eleven 6502's plus an additional one acting as the supervisor and comms link to a PC. The entire system was programmed in Forth, which I mostly rolled out from scratch. This included writing my own screen-based text editor. The PC ran APL.
The project was a bit more elaborate than that. As a very --very-- green college student I ended up presenting a paper on this project at an international ACM conference.
Once you bootstrap an embedded system with Forth the world changes. In '85 there were few reasons to slog it out using hand-coded assembler to automate a labeling machine. My guess is that he and/or his school did not have any exposure to the mounting Forth embedded community and so they ended-up doing it the hard way. That's still good. You learn a lot either way.
Re: How I coded in 1985
#60As a relatively new (5 or so years experience) programmer, 1985 sounds like hell.
Software development basically peaked in the mid 1980's.
Macintosh Common Lisp circa 1987: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V..., specifically: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
Firebug circa 2013: http://getfirebug.com/logging, specifically http://getfirebug.com/img/logging/consoleDir.png
