IT Stalwarts Remember

[Cobbydaler]

Interesting stuff...

Originally Posted by Noel Sharkey

The first computer I used was a PDP 11 with its 8K of memory in a box as big as a large filing cabinet. I had to program it with Octal keys which my hand seemed to learn to do automatically. I wrote my first AI program in 1979, an automated Haiku poet, in Basic on a Commodore Pet. There was no editor or software for the Pet so I had to write my own. I also wrote a Space Invaders for it to learn machine code. All of the programs were saved on an audio cassette player and I had to use a stopwatch to find them on the tape. Oh what we used to be able to do with a few K of memory in those days.

Link

[Hugh]

Ah, the days of old.

The first computer I worked on was in 1976, when NSA sent us a Hewlett-Packard box (about the size of an upright fridge-freezer), which did the work that eight of us used to do in one shift in around 14 minutes - I knew then that if I left the RAF, I knew which line of work I was going into.

And on that note, my first job in IT in 1980 was programming in Mainframe Assembler (using 2, 4, and 6 byte commands, with the last two bytes being over-writeable - ah, the joys of BE/BNE) on a Univac 90/30 running OS/3, with the data being input on 80 column punch cards.

[heero_yuy]

I remember writing embedded assembler in the late 70's on an F8 (Fairchild) processor: 2K EPROM, 64bytes RAM and NO hardware stack! You had to write the stack handler yourself.

The early development system used paper tapes and had a weird aluminised paper printer. Finally my employers were persuaded to buy the twin 8" floppy disk dev system. Oh the joys of CPM OS. Think that was the first "real" computer I used. Later they bought a PDP 11-23+ running Xenix so I cut my teeth on that so to speak.

[Anonymouse]

Ah, the joys of writing Assembler! Life in IT was so much simpler then!

It was also a hell of a lot more interesting and challenging, and users had much more control over what was going on - and if you didn't like what was going on or how it was being done, you could, to an extent, change it. I miss those days fiercely.

I've written:
6502 Assembler (by hand; I couldn't afford the VICMON cartridge) on the VIC-20;
Z80 Assembler (via the superb HiSoft DevPac Assembler/debugger) on the Sharp MZ-700 (a superb machine with an excellent keyboard, it had a machine code monitor built into the ROM, a complete assembler listing of the contents of that ROM in the manual [which made writing Assembler much easier] and no native language, so you could load whatever language you liked, even Forth);
80x86 on PCs (the only assembler I'd recommend is Borland's Turbo Assembler, which got the job done amazingly well given the pieces of trash it was running on);
68000 Assembler on the Atari ST (now there was a processor of elegance and power!).

Nowadays there are more and more layers of abstraction - or should that be obfuscation? - between computer and user, and computers - as far as software is concerned, at least - are going back to the black box days, i.e. it's becoming the province of arcane in-house specialists. They're forgetting the debt they owe to the hackers (using the term in its PROPER context, thank you very much!).

Mind you, the computer system I miss the most is the VAX-4000 at Bolton Institute; writing command files in DCL is fun if you know your way around the lexical functions and the Real-Time Library. VAX C was an utter joy to write software in, too.

[heero_yuy]

8086 assembler, great fun using the PC software interrupt functions. I wrote a program to play simple WAV files out of the internal speaker of the PC using a bit-stream technique. Assembled the program came to less than 1KByte and 256 bytes of that was the standard parameter passing buffer from the DOS command line.

I had an old copy of MASM and used the linker/locater from Quick Basic as that was DOS version independant.

I also remember coding Conways game of life into the graphics card, swapping memory arrays with each generation. The next generation frame being built in the off-screen array. Simply blisters along in assembler.

Real programming. Happy days.

These days I write almost excusively in traditional K&R C for embedded apps. Even then in a small project we now use the HAL (Hardware abstraction layer) with standard API calls, mainly to be able to have portable code. Changing CPU type then only involves writing a new HAL.

[Maggy J]

[Mr_love_monkey]

I look cool no matter what.


you guys have a fair few years on me so I can only talk about starting to program with the zx80, and bbc-b... that probably makes me some sort of spoilt child, since I actually _had_ a keyboard.

[Hugh]

A keyboard?

Luxury.....

[Mr_love_monkey]

punched cards?? - we used dream of 'aving punched cards - we used to program by shorting registers with nothing but a paper clip...

[Hom3r]

The oldest kit I used was the the size of a large fridge freezer, and you input data via switches (Binary).

[Jimmy-J]

Abacus!

[Maggy J]

Originally Posted by Mr_love_monkey

I look cool no matter what.

I see you have escaped your straight jackets again..

[Hugh]

Originally Posted by Mr_love_monkey

punched cards?? - we used dream of 'aving punched cards - we used to program by shorting registers with nothing but a paper clip...

Paper clip?

Luxury! We used to dream of 'avin' paper clips....

We used to pop t'top of t'stack into t'register wit' tongue, tha knows...

[Mr_love_monkey]

Originally Posted by Maggy J

I see you have escaped your straight jackets again..

what? my mum says I'm cool - it must be true..

---------- Post added at 14:24 ---------- Previous post was at 14:21 ----------

Originally Posted by Hugh

Paper clip?

Luxury! We used to dream of 'avin' paper clips....

We used to pop t'top of t'stack into t'register wit' tongue, tha knows...

well, I say it was a paper clip, it was really just the small finger of the foreign exchange student wrapped in tinfoil, but it was a paper clip to us...

[Uncle Peter]

Where I first worked we were phasing out an old ICL 2966. I managed to salvage the name plate before it was carted off to the scrapyard. I figured it was a bit too geeky to be hanging up in the house though.