On 27-Feb-16 14:57, Paul Koning wrote: >> On Feb 27, 2016, at 2:49 PM, Bill Cunningham <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Thanks much. Yes I know you were speaking of assembly. I was just >> considering history. I've always heard binary was first. What that might >> mean IDK. And there was no evidence presented for that. > It may just be a case of people not familiar with early documents, > extrapolating from the fact that early programming was in machine language > and many early machines were binary. In other words, overlooking the fact > that the use of octal or even decimal would be a pretty natural choice even > right at the beginning. > > paul Binary, octal, hex - all the same thing. Just how you group the bits.
I programmed on the switches (binary), but thought in octal. Or Hex. Mentally translating even the large PDP-10 or VAX instruction set to binary is no more difficult than speaking a second language. The -8 and -11 are equivalent to baby talk :-) I ended up doing this a lot during hardware debug, where the machine didn't work well enough for debuggers with instruction decode to work. (yet). Easiest way to write a quick test or scope loop. After a while I could look at a few instructions in memory near the PC and tell where in the OS they came from. My coworkers were amused (and slightly frightened) when I told them where to look in the VMS listings, and quoted the comments verbatim :-) Before that, when machines had ASR33s for "mass storage", it was a whole lot faster to debug and patch on the switches than to prepare an error free source tape, load the assembler, load the tape twice (2-pass assembler), punch the binary, load the binary - and check the results. Not that assemblers and HLLs are bad things. The environment dictates what's feasible - and one should always use the right tool for a job. Hitting a screw with a hammer may be cathartic, but the result isn't optimal.
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
_______________________________________________ Simh mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
