Growing up in a small town in Sweden, there were no C64 book
about assembly programming I knew off.
I wish I had learned 6502 op-code early on.
The coding I did later on was in pure machine-code there
I calculated the branch off-sets etc by hand.
I was programming at GE in 1973 - writing programs on COBOL coding forms to be sent to keypunch thru inter-office mail and then loaded into the computer. We were lucky to get two compiles a day.
My first computer was a Commodore 64. Then I got a PC JR and "souped it up" with a second floppy drive upped the memory to 512K.
I was fortunate to have an eight page article/assembler program published in PC Magazine in Sept '86.
Assembling a program using two floppy drives was so much fun...
If you used battery operated shoe shine brush to wind up paper tape.
If updating was going from ASR-33 TTY to high speed stand alone paper tape reader.
If you know how to splice paper tape and done it more than 100 times.
If you know what TTY means.
If you know that ROLM company made heavy duty computers before they made telephone switches.
If you can name and / or actually own first laptop computer ever (made by Radio Shack.)
If you actually found a business application for company's Lisa to impress your boss.
If you can describe what Carterphone Decision was for.
if you remember Kilobaud Mag
if you have a drawer full of rs232 gender changers and modem flippers and remember
how for some reason you always ended up with all of them connected in series before both
sides talked.
if you bought a 160K floppy for $600 only to find out after it stored the operating system there
was not much left for you program. So it did disk swaps. Put disk 1 in Put disk 2 in Put disk 1 in
I remember the joy of having two drives and watching it go back and forth between them.
if assembling the code for a 8748 microcontroller on 8 in floppys taking 30min was considered
state of the art. Also if you think 6 character variable names was ok.
Being part of the first to do a resume on my own computer using Wordstar then getting it printed
at the local computer store using their daisy wheel printer which cost over a $1000.
I actually printed a resume on my dot matrix printer and because I sent it to tech types it helped as
they were impressed I had computer skills to do it, forget that it looked ugly. For the day it was pretty
good however.
if you remember eproms and still have an eprom eraser somewhere in my lab.
If you 'chased the beam' to make a 'High end graphical adventure'
If you ever thought that 4KB is more memory than any one can use for a single application.
If you ever wrote your own cooperative multitasker in 6502 Machine language, after reading about the 'Multiprogramming Environments' of the 'Big computers'.
If you were reluctant to buy a Macro Assembler at first, because Hand assemble gets the job done.
If you ever used a recursive stack based algorithm for expression parsing to write your first Pascal compiler (because you could not find one for your Commodore 64).
if you have a drawer full of rs232 gender changers and modem flippers and remember
how for some reason you always ended up with all of them connected in series before both
sides talked.
Ha! That made me spit out my coffee. You see I have been up to my neck in serial cables, gender benders and null modem flippers for the past month. Some old equipment just won't die.
If you had to sign a non-Commercial statement in order to get an account on the Darpa Net before it became open and referred to as the Internet. (can't remember if that was what it was called then)
You used Compuserve so much that you still remember your CSID 71170,???? and you had to use one of the applications that would minimize 2 hours of reading and writing post to 120 seconds of connect time because CIS charged $40+ per hour to connect.
Note: I guess I fail because I can not longer remember the entire CSID
I wasn't so hard core back in the day; my friends from college used to carry their stacks of Hollerith cards around but I just played on the TRS80s in the library. But I did have a Multics account!
Did anyone else write TSR programs with DOS debug?
Some equipment still won't die? At my company, we're still getting orders for systems running VMS. They've moved from VAXes to microVAXes to Alphas to Itaniums, but the old guys running the plants that our systems support want its reliability, which Windows and even Linux just can't offer.
If your computer came with 4k of Ram, and you went to the 2nd annual West Coast Computer Faire and bought a 4k memory expansion BOARD for $529.00, and thought to yourself, "what a great deal I got!"
Did anyone else write TSR programs with DOS debug?
Yes. In High School I wrote a TSR which hooked the Print Screen key to print CGA graphics to a LaserJet. (Something the CSR said couldn't be done.)
Hmm.. you might be an old geek if your first portable computer had a CRT
... tweaked config.sys to load TSRs and still have enough RAM to play the game
... remember the difference between Control-Open Apple-Reset and Control-Closed Apple-Reset
... used a hole punch to double your disk space
... still use a Model-M keyboard
In fact I just bought myself one a few months ago (new -- been sitting in a warehouse since 1992). 'Best purchase I ever made! Its heavy, robust, and has great tactile feedback. Modern keyboards just plain suck. Mac keyboards are especially bad -- like typing on a foam rubber pillow.
Has anyone tried the modern variants of the Model M, made by Unicomp? Here's a segment about them from NPR:
I once wrote a TSR which toggled the caps lock state of the keyboard every system tick (17 times a second). I would never, ever have snuck that into someone's autoexec.bat file while they were away from their machine -- well, not more than once or twice :-)
- If you had a system for marking the edges of your punched cards in case you dropped the deck
- If you ever wrote a program that converted between EBCDIC and ASCII
- If you could read a punched card just by holding it up to the light and looking at the holes
- If you had line printer art hanging on the wall in your dorm room
- If you had to put your name on a signup sheet to get time on the only minicomputer in the EE department
- If you assembled large electronic projects with a wire-wrap gun
- If your DRAM chips required three voltages
- If you knew how to use a tube tester
Wait a minute! Modula-2 isn't old. Is it? IS IT? [SIZE=+2]IS IT?!!![/SIZE]
-Phil
It depends on whether you used it when it was new, or more recently. But my Modula-2 books are up on the shelp right next to my copy of the Algol-68 specification...
... if you've ever pored through a hundred feet of TRS-80 Z80 code disassembly to find ways to hook into (and improve) Level II BASIC:
(I can't believe I've saved that all these years.)
-Phil
OK. I wrote an interactive Z80 disassembler in Microsoft Fortran for the TRS-80 Model I, that would read existing binaries, allow you to mark various portions of the address space as instructions, it would follow all the possible execution threads, and eventually produce a MASM listing. I used to produce a fully-commented disassebled MASM source for TRSDOS 2.3, because I was going to "fix" it...
And I do have a copy the TRS-80 Level II ROM Disassembled book (somewhere -- I think that was the name of it).
Comments
about assembly programming I knew off.
I wish I had learned 6502 op-code early on.
The coding I did later on was in pure machine-code there
I calculated the branch off-sets etc by hand.
C-64, Tac-II and Datasette
My first computer was a Commodore 64. Then I got a PC JR and "souped it up" with a second floppy drive upped the memory to 512K.
I was fortunate to have an eight page article/assembler program published in PC Magazine in Sept '86.
Assembling a program using two floppy drives was so much fun...
Acoustic modems, TV's for monitor's, 300 baud, paper tape.
Really scary when you recognize something in every post!
Cheers,
geek on!
If updating was going from ASR-33 TTY to high speed stand alone paper tape reader.
If you know how to splice paper tape and done it more than 100 times.
If you know what TTY means.
If you know that ROLM company made heavy duty computers before they made telephone switches.
If you can name and / or actually own first laptop computer ever (made by Radio Shack.)
If you actually found a business application for company's Lisa to impress your boss.
If you can describe what Carterphone Decision was for.
if you have a drawer full of rs232 gender changers and modem flippers and remember
how for some reason you always ended up with all of them connected in series before both
sides talked.
if you bought a 160K floppy for $600 only to find out after it stored the operating system there
was not much left for you program. So it did disk swaps. Put disk 1 in Put disk 2 in Put disk 1 in
I remember the joy of having two drives and watching it go back and forth between them.
if assembling the code for a 8748 microcontroller on 8 in floppys taking 30min was considered
state of the art. Also if you think 6 character variable names was ok.
Being part of the first to do a resume on my own computer using Wordstar then getting it printed
at the local computer store using their daisy wheel printer which cost over a $1000.
I actually printed a resume on my dot matrix printer and because I sent it to tech types it helped as
they were impressed I had computer skills to do it, forget that it looked ugly. For the day it was pretty
good however.
if you remember eproms and still have an eprom eraser somewhere in my lab.
Tom
If you ever thought that 4KB is more memory than any one can use for a single application.
If you ever wrote your own cooperative multitasker in 6502 Machine language, after reading about the 'Multiprogramming Environments' of the 'Big computers'.
If you were reluctant to buy a Macro Assembler at first, because Hand assemble gets the job done.
If you ever used a recursive stack based algorithm for expression parsing to write your first Pascal compiler (because you could not find one for your Commodore 64). So if you ever used a modem
Ha! That made me spit out my coffee. You see I have been up to my neck in serial cables, gender benders and null modem flippers for the past month. Some old equipment just won't die.
You used Compuserve so much that you still remember your CSID 71170,???? and you had to use one of the applications that would minimize 2 hours of reading and writing post to 120 seconds of connect time because CIS charged $40+ per hour to connect.
Note: I guess I fail because I can not longer remember the entire CSID
If you can touch type on a hexadecimal keypad...
If you compute relative offsets in your head...
If you remember the opcodes but forget the mnemonics...
You mean people do not do this anymore?
- If the "POKEY" chip rings a bell (pun intended) , you might be an old geek.
- If temporarily turning off the display graphics to gain about 30% more processing speed was a valuable programming trick, you might be an old geek.
lol - potatohead ... my wife's initials are cls ... and yes I have already made the association.
If the "GITA" chip looks familiar (pun intended), you might be an old geek.
If hand cutting rubylith was used in IC layout, you might be an old geek.
Did anyone else write TSR programs with DOS debug?
Some equipment still won't die? At my company, we're still getting orders for systems running VMS. They've moved from VAXes to microVAXes to Alphas to Itaniums, but the old guys running the plants that our systems support want its reliability, which Windows and even Linux just can't offer.
Look what I just found tucked away in the bookshelf ... Why can't we get rid of anything?!! :-)
I feel like this discussion aught to be for counselling... :-)
"Hi, My name is Beau. I'm a geek from the late 70's"
- Extra GEEK points if you know what "L.E.W.P." stands for
-Matt
I wonder how many days of my life I spent stepping thru executable files one instruction at a time with DEBUG trying to figure out the code.
Copy protection schemes were really interesting - many self-modifying code techniques, etc.
Sound familiar?
Still have my Macro Assembler manual on the bookshelf
Hmm.. you might be an old geek if your first portable computer had a CRT
... tweaked config.sys to load TSRs and still have enough RAM to play the game
... remember the difference between Control-Open Apple-Reset and Control-Closed Apple-Reset
... used a hole punch to double your disk space
... still use a Model-M keyboard
Has anyone tried the modern variants of the Model M, made by Unicomp? Here's a segment about them from NPR:
-Phil
- If you ever wrote a program that converted between EBCDIC and ASCII
- If you could read a punched card just by holding it up to the light and looking at the holes
- If you had line printer art hanging on the wall in your dorm room
- If you had to put your name on a signup sheet to get time on the only minicomputer in the EE department
- If you assembled large electronic projects with a wire-wrap gun
- If your DRAM chips required three voltages
- If you knew how to use a tube tester
It depends on whether you used it when it was new, or more recently. But my Modula-2 books are up on the shelp right next to my copy of the Algol-68 specification...
OK. I wrote an interactive Z80 disassembler in Microsoft Fortran for the TRS-80 Model I, that would read existing binaries, allow you to mark various portions of the address space as instructions, it would follow all the possible execution threads, and eventually produce a MASM listing. I used to produce a fully-commented disassebled MASM source for TRSDOS 2.3, because I was going to "fix" it...
And I do have a copy the TRS-80 Level II ROM Disassembled book (somewhere -- I think that was the name of it).
At that time -- Byte Magazine, a.k.a. "The Phone Book"
If I recall correctly, the new magazine was going to be called Kilobyte, but the folks at Byte didn't like that too much, and threatened to sue...