It was Sep 30, 2000, 16:48, when Austin L. Denyer keyboarded:
>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...
Ha! I know tricks like that one too! I had a machine like that, and wrote
a simple but functioning accounting system in it :)
>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.
Hahahaha!! Memories are coming back indeed... And even where you needed
more speed than the machine could actually deliver, you'd have to fool the
processor, or invent strange code to steal a cycle here or there...
>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.
I agree. People that learn to program these days, on visual such and so,
can't understand that you can write a complete program in less than
500Kbytes.
Paul
--
Yesterday it worked.
Today nothing is working.
Windows is like that.
http://nlpagan.net - ICQ 147208 - Registered Linux User 174403
-=PINE 4.21 on Linux Mandrake 7.1=-
