Trevor Farrell wrote:
> "Brian T. Schellenberger" wrote:
>
> > I was writing code for maximum portablity on Unix and other systems 8
> > or 9 years ago, and not striving to make it the smallest that could be
> > achived, though 15 years ago I can remember sweating how small I could
> > make it to cram stuff under the 640k line, and cursing Bill's name for
> > introducing the damned line in the first place. Even then, though, I
> > *also* had to make it work on systems from IBM mainframes to
> > minicomputers.
> >
> > I was also reading usenet 18 years ago . . .
> >
> > Can't say my programming life is all that different today . . .
>
> Hey, I can remember trying to write a noughts & crosses (tic-tac-toe)
> game for a handheld with 1424 bytes of ram! and a 256K 4 bit
> processor! in BASIC! Those were the days when you had to work hard for
> every ounce of speed & memory.
<Chuckles>
Well, I do remember the big chain printers from IBM, and, being a "just in
time" kind of guy and needing a couple of Fourier coefficients for a
numerical analysis class, finding all the computers tied up, I rewired the
printer to generate them. Two hours later, it chugged them out....
I think we are fortunate indeed that hardware has become cheap relative to
human time, else we'd be coding in octal or hexadecimal, or, worse, yet,
using patchboards.
Civileme
