Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I coded in 1985

blog.jgc.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 120 posts

Re: How I coded in 1985

#91

Post by Someone »

reeses wrote: post #85
kragen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you going to make the logic devices from? I've speculated about this extensively in http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-June/00... but I still don't have a working scratch-built computer.

You can make transistors with some...hazardous components, but you may want to start with relays or tubes and resistors (which could, theoretically, just be varying lengths/guages of wire) and build NAND gates. It would be big, hot, noisy, slow, and a huge waste of your time, but there were computers before semiconductors.

For the curious: here's how you make your own tubes from glass, metal wire and metal sheets: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EzyXMEpq4qw.

Re: How I coded in 1985

#92

Post by robomartin »

kragen wrote: post #74
robomartin wrote: post #59

This 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 Funny enough, I built an eleven processor parallel-ish computer in 1985 to control a large (three feet high) walking robot. That's in the days when you couldn't buy kits for this stuff. You had to design all of the m…

My experience so far is that my Forth is shorter, but my assembly has fewer bugs. Maybe this means that Forth wins for larger projects, because it's harder to read but easier to write?

Perhaps your last few words reveal the reason for the bugs? Forth --or any other language-- is hard to read only when someone doesn't know it or does not use it frequently enough. For example, I programmed in Lisp nearly every day for a couple of years. I could read Lisp without even thinking about it. That was fifteen years ago. Today I would struggle to make sense out of a non-trivial Lisp program for a couple of weeks.

If you use Forth as intended I can't see how you would introduce more bugs when compared to anything. Few languages are inherently buggy. Bugs can nearly always be traced to the programmer, not the language.

Re: How I coded in 1985

#94

Post by kragen »

kragen wrote: post #74
robomartin wrote: post #59

This 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 Funny enough, I built an eleven processor parallel-ish computer in 1985 to control a large (three feet high) walking robot. That's in the days when you couldn't buy kits for this stuff. You had to design all of the m…

My experience so far is that my Forth is shorter, but my assembly has fewer bugs. Maybe this means that Forth wins for larger projects, because it's harder to read but easier to write?

Oops, I meant "easier to read but harder to write".

Re: How I coded in 1985

#95

Post by kragen »

robomartin wrote: post #92
kragen wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience so far is that my Forth is shorter, but my assembly has fewer bugs. Maybe this means that Forth wins for larger projects, because it's harder to read but easier to write?

Perhaps your last few words reveal the reason for the bugs? Forth --or any other language-- is hard to read only when someone doesn't know it or does not use it frequently enough. For example, I programmed in Lisp nearly every day for a couple of years. I could read Lisp without even thinking about it. That was fifteen years ago. Today I would struggle to make sense out of a non-trivial Lisp program for a couple of w…

All bugs can be traced to the programmer, of course. I find Forth error-prone because it's untyped (not even dynamically typed) and you have parameter-passing errors, where you pass a parameter or get a return value from the wrong place. Traditionally, too, you don't have local variables, but I think that's not actually nearly as big a problem as it sounds.

That said, my last few words were exactly backward from what I meant to say. Harder to write than assembly, because you have to take more care to avoid stack-effect bugs and you don't have local variables; but easier to read, because your Forth isn't full of arbitrary noise about which register you're using for what.

Re: How I coded in 1985

#96

Post by kragen »

reeses wrote: post #85
kragen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you going to make the logic devices from? I've speculated about this extensively in http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-June/00... but I still don't have a working scratch-built computer.

You can make transistors with some...hazardous components, but you may want to start with relays or tubes and resistors (which could, theoretically, just be varying lengths/guages of wire) and build NAND gates. It would be big, hot, noisy, slow, and a huge waste of your time, but there were computers before semiconductors.

In a practical apocalypse, you might be able to recover transistors from garbage dumps, too.

Re: How I coded in 1985

#97

Post by tluyben2 »

salgernon wrote: post #57
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I bought a box of these recently and they are really great; I used to have TRS 80 III and 4 so when I saw I box (don't hit me) of model 100s for 10 euros I bought it. They're a very nice addition to my museum and batteries last forever. The box had 1 Sharp PC-1211 too. Talking about battery life :)

What always amuses me is that my computers from around 2000 are not working anymore (heck, most laptops I have from the past 10 years are not even booting anymore) while computers from my parents basement which are around 30 years old just work like they just came from the shop. Even the Philips computers from that time who had known capacitor issues in the power circuitry work like time didn't happen.

Re: How I coded in 1985

#99

Post by cpher »

edw519 wrote: post #5

That 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…

Damn, I love reading your comments. Although my early memories were from typing BASIC programs into a Commodore 64...from the back of a magazine! (I'm a little younger than you).

Re: How I coded in 1985

#100

Post by tinco »

This weekend for the ludum dare someone made an implementation of Pong on his C64, in a weird turn of events he had to resort to printing out screenshots of memory dumps, run those through an OCR. But the OCR was buggy and he had to check every byte by hand.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/04/29/ponkmortem/#more-2...

Reminded me a bit of this story..

Post reply on HN