Assembly Language for Beginners [pdf]

Post by cylinder714 » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 7:14 PM UTC

wglb wrote: post #56

cylinder714 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me, but I'm struggling to understand how much useful work one could extract from a computer with only 32k of RAM. A microcontroller for an appliance, sure, but a mainframe? Could you tell us more about the work you were doing?

In 1970, a company named Telemed built an Electrocardiograph analysis service where hospitals would call in from all around the country and send ECGs over the telephone line with analog FM signals, three channels at a time. The computer located near Chicago would accept the incoming call, digitize the three analog signals every 2ms to 10 bits, write them to disk, and decode the touch-tone patient ID. When the call wa…

Post by tux3 » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

cylinder714 wrote: post #61

wglb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1970, a company named Telemed built an Electrocardiograph analysis service where hospitals would call in from all around the country and send ECGs over the telephone line with analog FM signals, three channels at a time. The computer located near Chicago would accept the incoming call, digitize the three analog signals every 2ms to 10 bits, write them to disk, and decode the touch-tone patient ID. When the call wa…

Thank you, that's brilliant! It is unfortunate that the source code is lost to humanity, as an example of what is possible.

Post by danellis » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 7:37 PM UTC

cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #55

cylinder714 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me, but I'm struggling to understand how much useful work one could extract from a computer with only 32k of RAM. A microcontroller for an appliance, sure, but a mainframe? Could you tell us more about the work you were doing?

You could land a spaceship in the moon with a computer with less RAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

Post by colejohnson66 » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 7:46 PM UTC

ehaliewicz2 wrote: post #59

cylinder714 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me, but I'm struggling to understand how much useful work one could extract from a computer with only 32k of RAM. A microcontroller for an appliance, sure, but a mainframe? Could you tell us more about the work you were doing?

The original gameboy has 8K of RAM and the first and second gen pokemon games run on it. Most of the hard work is done by the graphics and sound hardware. Fairly large games though.

Post by johannes1234321 » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 8:20 PM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #41

znpy wrote: post #27

Maybe too much content? 1000+ pages, many architectures... Probably too much content for a beginner book? Btw, a great book imho is "Assembly Language Step By Step - Programming with Linux - 3rd ed" ( https://musho.tk/l/d2d56a34 ). The great things is that it is an easy read and really starts from the basic and explains how the i386 architecture works, and then explains how to program it using assembly. The sad thing…

I have the first or second edition of "Assembly Language Step By Step", and it's the best intro I know of. It must be difficult to write a good assembly book. On one hand there's a lot of basics to cover, like memory addressing, segmentation registers, etc. But on the other hand, the main use case for it today is hand optimized functions for when the compiler can't optimize enough, which is inherently an advanced top…