Paul wrote:
>
> 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.
>
For an example of tight (and I mean TRICKY TIGHT! ) aquire and reverse
engineer the original Microsoft BASIC. What had been around 48K on the
PDP-11 was packed into a 4k ROM.
A trully brilliant bit of optimising of existing code segments.
Can't for the life of me remember who the work was attributed too -
but I rather think he'd be a rather rich dude these days.
<TIC>
Cheers
> 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=-
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"The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected"
(The UNIX Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June 1972.)
