aesculus
Still Trying to Figure This All Out
When the IBM PC came out you had two choices: Basic interpreter or assembler. Anything serious had to be done with the assembler.
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Old farts reminiscing about computers
- Thread starter HankLloydRight
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I did a lot of assembler on the Apple ][, because well, when you have a 1MHz 8-bit processor, you sometimes need to squeeze a little extra out of the CPU. One of the more crazy things I did was write a spreadsheet program, starting with a numerics package and a UI toolkit. In 65C816 assembly language. Ah, those were the days...
Bruce.
thecloud
As rhythm raced inside, the ship came alive
That was also true of the Apple ][, which came out 4 years earlier, and the Macintosh, which came out 3 years later. I recall Microsoft BASIC being available on the Mac pretty much from the start, but it took a little while for usable Pascal and C compilers to appear. Initially the development environment was 3 separate programs called "Edit," "Asm," and "Link", which you used in that order. Good times.
CuriousG
Active Member
]CALL -151
I remember frantically copying frantically the assembly programs available from some paper publication (BYTE magazine?). With all the numbers you had to type, to this day I still use the upper keys rather than numeric keypad to type numbers.
On the C64, assembler was the only supported way to write GEOS apps as well... they actually had a pretty mature API, and documented it in the GEOS Programmer's Reference guide, along with their development tools: a symbolic assembler, linker and debugger (which could take advantage of the RAM expansion units to be invokable in real time with almost no foreground memory footprint).
Later "The Hitchhiker's Guide to GEOS" (HG2G) became available, which was a collection of Berkeley Softworks' internal documentation for the system, which allowed even more access to the system.
That whole OS was pretty amazing considering what it did and the HW constraints it lived within..
One more book - Revolution in the Valley, by Andy Herztfeld about the creation of the Macintosh. If you are nostalgic about assembly coding, you can get your fix here.
GlmnAlyAirCar
Active Member
Thanks.. .that's actually the book form of this material I referenced:
- Folklore.org - Inside accounts from the guys who built the Mac. Presented as snippets.
anticitizen13.7
Not posting at TMC after 9/17/2018
What I remember most about the PCs of years and decades past was just how quickly they seemed to become obsolete. I used to crave upgrades in the 90's. 486s quickly gave way to Pentiums, which got blown away by the nifty Celeron-128 (that 128kb integrated L2 cache was freaking awesome for everyday tasks), and then AMD Athlon was the dark horse that put Intel on the defense for a long time.
Now, my home computer is a notebook that is over 5 years old, and it doesn't ever seem to break a sweat or come close to running out of RAM.
There is still a huge following for ancient Macs that run Mac OS 9: An OS 9 odyssey: Why these Mac users won’t abandon 16-year-old software Many people believe that the Classic Mac OS allows for more focused workflow. Software and software licenses are also issues that keep the old Macs alive and productive.
Now, my home computer is a notebook that is over 5 years old, and it doesn't ever seem to break a sweat or come close to running out of RAM.
There is still a huge following for ancient Macs that run Mac OS 9: An OS 9 odyssey: Why these Mac users won’t abandon 16-year-old software Many people believe that the Classic Mac OS allows for more focused workflow. Software and software licenses are also issues that keep the old Macs alive and productive.
I avoided this thread for the longest time then got sucked in and read every post. I used RENUM (z/OS ISPF editor command - pretty powerful editor if you read the manual <grin>) less than 1 year ago before megacorp laid me off when they had a bad financial quarter.
Me too. I have a former co-worker friend who has an old desktop that runs on obsolete version of Windows just so he can run the PC version of the ISPF editor (SPF/PC), claiming it's still the most powerful text editor ever. I was a System Programmer and Assembler coder on IBM mainframes from the 360/40 (a huge 256kb of memory) to the z/800 6 years ago. Didn't retire until my 60s however.
Geez. I just now find this thread after a year.
I'm 36 and remember using cpm on a zenith computer my dad built. I actually learned my abc on there. I was the first person to turn in a computer printed report to school. First to use powerpoint for a presentation. I had teachers in awe at my slide presentation.
I'm 36 and remember using cpm on a zenith computer my dad built. I actually learned my abc on there. I was the first person to turn in a computer printed report to school. First to use powerpoint for a presentation. I had teachers in awe at my slide presentation.
Plugsuvohio
Member
Ok, since we are comparing experiences, I'm 65 and in love with my MX. I also walked into a Radio Shack and saw the very 1st TRS-80 Model I they received. I took it home after begging them to let me have it. My wife sat with me as we spent what seemed like an hour typing in first program. (nobody knew about Hello World yet). Voila - I could shoot a square across the screen, parabolic arc and hit the other side.
In college I had the opportunity to take WATFive (Fortran variant) if I remember, O29 key punch cards. The computer that took up an entire room. 2-3" stacks of program punch cards for the most simplistic program. You submitted your job (if you didn't drop them first) and came back 3 hours later to find the run time was like 0.01 seconds and failed. Try again.
I actually wound up using Model I it to do simple inventory control in my manufacturing company cassette tape and all. I skipped Model II, got bought the earliest Model 16 with 16 MB of memory, serial and parallel ports and also bought a 5MB hard disk. What could anyone possibly do with that groundbreakinig horsepower and nearly infinite storage. But most important was discovery of Unix, and Xenix variant that the TRS80 used. Got a modem, 1200 baud and got into bulletin boards. Learned about Milnent and Usenet Set which was very new. Set up a 2 modem public access Xenix system for people to log into. Found someone spending hours at a time connected and found him teaching himself C at 300 baud, Good times.
Lots more after that, but you get the idea and I kept with this technology thru retirement and got the MX.
In college I had the opportunity to take WATFive (Fortran variant) if I remember, O29 key punch cards. The computer that took up an entire room. 2-3" stacks of program punch cards for the most simplistic program. You submitted your job (if you didn't drop them first) and came back 3 hours later to find the run time was like 0.01 seconds and failed. Try again.
I actually wound up using Model I it to do simple inventory control in my manufacturing company cassette tape and all. I skipped Model II, got bought the earliest Model 16 with 16 MB of memory, serial and parallel ports and also bought a 5MB hard disk. What could anyone possibly do with that groundbreakinig horsepower and nearly infinite storage. But most important was discovery of Unix, and Xenix variant that the TRS80 used. Got a modem, 1200 baud and got into bulletin boards. Learned about Milnent and Usenet Set which was very new. Set up a 2 modem public access Xenix system for people to log into. Found someone spending hours at a time connected and found him teaching himself C at 300 baud, Good times.
Lots more after that, but you get the idea and I kept with this technology thru retirement and got the MX.
Gizmotoy
Active Member
The book is superior in a lot of ways. There are some fantastic wiring diagrams and handwritten code reproduced in the book that isn't available on the website. While some of the stories are exclusive to the book, many are the same. Either way, the additional media in the book really brought them to life, IMO.Thanks.. .that's actually the book form of this material I referenced:
Book form probably makes it easier to consume offline... but not as inexpensively
- Folklore.org - Inside accounts from the guys who built the Mac. Presented as snippets.
Gizmotoy
Active Member
If you've read all of Folklore.org I wouldn't pay the $20 or whatever Amazon wants for it new, but if you could grab a copy for $5-$10 or so, I don't think you'd be disappointed with it.
swaltner
Active Member
"3dog" was the first thing that came to mind for me as well. Still fond memories of the computer class in high school (junior year maybe), where we got through the required material on programming in BASIC on the Apple //e gear about a week before the end of the school year. The teacher had us looking at the raw hex dumps of memory seeing how Apple saved BASIC programs in RAM. Very enlightening...
I'm 48, my first encounter with a computer was in the first year of high-school in Hungary (1982) with a computer called HT-1080Z:
HT
It was similar in capabilities to the TRS-80. I learned Basic, then Assembly and even direct machine code programming on it as loading the Assembler program from the tape was very slow, and it was quicker to enter code in hex numbers directly to the memory. A year later I become the school's computer guru and ran the computer club, we wrote very simple programs relating to what we learned in physics / chemistry to do some calculations and very basic simulations with primitive graphics.
In the third year I bought my very own first computer, a Commodore-64. Learned M6510 Assembly, wrote a bunch of fun little programs from Mandelbrot set drawing to Core-Wars simulator and that pretty much sealed my carrier choice, I went to University to study Computer Science.
In first year University I switched back to the Zilog CPU family with my second home computer, the Enterprise-128
Enterprise (computer) - Wikipedia
It had an amazing little Operating system called EXOS, which was extendible, so you could write drivers to control other hardware via its open full system bus. With a couple of friends we started attaching PC-keyboards and floppy drives to it and setup our own little LAN over serial port. Eventually it morphed into a 286 PC when I had enough money to buy a motherboard and 80286 CPU.
Fun times...
HT
It was similar in capabilities to the TRS-80. I learned Basic, then Assembly and even direct machine code programming on it as loading the Assembler program from the tape was very slow, and it was quicker to enter code in hex numbers directly to the memory. A year later I become the school's computer guru and ran the computer club, we wrote very simple programs relating to what we learned in physics / chemistry to do some calculations and very basic simulations with primitive graphics.
In the third year I bought my very own first computer, a Commodore-64. Learned M6510 Assembly, wrote a bunch of fun little programs from Mandelbrot set drawing to Core-Wars simulator and that pretty much sealed my carrier choice, I went to University to study Computer Science.
In first year University I switched back to the Zilog CPU family with my second home computer, the Enterprise-128
Enterprise (computer) - Wikipedia
It had an amazing little Operating system called EXOS, which was extendible, so you could write drivers to control other hardware via its open full system bus. With a couple of friends we started attaching PC-keyboards and floppy drives to it and setup our own little LAN over serial port. Eventually it morphed into a 286 PC when I had enough money to buy a motherboard and 80286 CPU.
Fun times...
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