Them were the days #;-D
The machine I referred to was a strange old beast with a 6502 processor. It
kept crashing because the heat melted the glue that held the stickers over
the windows of the EPROMs (the UV killed the EPROMs) - we had to keep
blowing them and re-programming the EPROMs.
I thought all my birthdays had come at once when I finally got a QWERTY
keyboard and a Hercules monochrome monitor so that I could program in
assembly...
I remember having many hours of fun with the Z80 as well (actually an
8080A). I had a version of the old arcade game 'Space Invaders' that ran in
under one kilobyte of RAM! Eat yer heart out, Mr. Gates...
One of my favorite tricks was the old 'zero-page' register - it almost
halved the addressing space required, and greatly speeded up operation.
Oh, the delights of having to load every calculation into the accumulator
for every operation. The fun of having to initialize the data direction of
a port before you could use it. The pain of placing redundant instructions
inside nested loops to achieve time delays, calculated manually by the
instruction time for each operation.
The programmers of today don't know they're born...
One of the beauties of Linux is that it allows you to get back to tight
code, and real optimizations, rather than the slow bloatware of other
systems.
Regards,
Ozz.
> I remember programming in computer repair class,
> we used the old Z80 cpu with just an alphanumeric
> keyboard with a ribbon cable to the MB and
> the old blue alphanumeric vacuum fluorescent display
> using hex code, cpu instrucitons, accumulator register,
> BC register, and all those other little wierdo registers.
>
> then we moved on to using CPM.
>
> then dos--eww.
>
>
>
> On Sat, 30 Sep 2000, Austin L. Denyer wrote:
>
> > It also helps for programming. Those of us who can remember programming
in
> > raw hex using a 25-key keypad with a 7-segment LED display on a machine
with
> > only a few kilobytes of RAM know the importance of tight code. A lot of
> > today's programmers wouldn't believe the applications we could write in
a
> > few kilobytes. Also, the tight code ran so much faster than today's
> > bloatware...
> >
> > Oh well.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Ozz.
>
>
