I felt old the day I was cleaning the garage and the kids asked why I was keeping a box of broken phones. They were not broke as I told them. They couldn't understand my answer as none of those phones had any buttons for the numbers. When I told them that you use to DIAL a number using a rotor, they concluded it would have never worked!
...There was also an Assembly cartridge for the 2600 I thought, but I couldn't find a link. I was sure I used it also, but maybe it was just on the Atari 400/800
I'm sorry to be so flippant, yes it happens that bad coders write bad code, with bad comments, that is hard to follow.
Luckily in my career that has not been the case, everything has been commented and documented very well. Or, if it was not, it was soon removed.
Except...sometimes it's just not possible.
A simple example: The Fast Fourier Transform can be written in a page of code. It can work very well. I swear it has taken me twenty or more years to start to understand how it works. No amount of nice code layout and commenting would have helped there.
In the modern world we have things like the Kalman filters helping us with our inertial navigation problems, fusing inputs from accelerometers, gyros, magnetometers, etc. There is no way to understand that code unless you know the maths. The explanation for sure does not fit in the comments.
A big storm.
A power outage.
A portable electric generator.
Worries about the storm, concerns about a tornado warning.
An old TV.
An even older TV antenna I find in storage.
Questions from kids about that V-shaped thing I propped up behind the TV.
The looks on their faces when I answer, "Rabbit ears."
I had never even heard of pulse dialing until I had a Hayes Micromodem then it was many years before I actually saw a rotary phone.
.
There must be some dial phones still in use. The VOIP modem that my cable company supplies detects both tone and pulse dialing so you can use any phone with it. Why would they bother to build that in unless they thought that rotary phones and other pulse dialing devices (maybe really old alarm systems) were still in use?
Comments
Those old games are very simple to play so it's no wonder that kids today prefer them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Programming
...There was also an Assembly cartridge for the 2600 I thought, but I couldn't find a link. I was sure I used it also, but maybe it was just on the Atari 400/800
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Assembler_Editor
I believe I was 10 or 11 years old programming in Assembly :-)
And when you consider that it was first may without a CPU and RAM, it is delightful to ponder how all those logic chips work in concert.
Great new word you have invented there, by the way:)
I'm sorry to be so flippant, yes it happens that bad coders write bad code, with bad comments, that is hard to follow.
Luckily in my career that has not been the case, everything has been commented and documented very well. Or, if it was not, it was soon removed.
Except...sometimes it's just not possible.
A simple example: The Fast Fourier Transform can be written in a page of code. It can work very well. I swear it has taken me twenty or more years to start to understand how it works. No amount of nice code layout and commenting would have helped there.
In the modern world we have things like the Kalman filters helping us with our inertial navigation problems, fusing inputs from accelerometers, gyros, magnetometers, etc. There is no way to understand that code unless you know the maths. The explanation for sure does not fit in the comments.
A power outage.
A portable electric generator.
Worries about the storm, concerns about a tornado warning.
An old TV.
An even older TV antenna I find in storage.
Questions from kids about that V-shaped thing I propped up behind the TV.
The looks on their faces when I answer, "Rabbit ears."
There must be some dial phones still in use. The VOIP modem that my cable company supplies detects both tone and pulse dialing so you can use any phone with it. Why would they bother to build that in unless they thought that rotary phones and other pulse dialing devices (maybe really old alarm systems) were still in use?
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2014/05/hilarious-video-kids-react-to-old-computers/