5 ms·

Cool article. Must of been one hell of an smile on their face every time DOS ran on the machine properly after being assembled on a separate machine. Q̶u̶e̶u̶e

by mkhalil 11y ago

Cool article. Must of been one hell of an smile on their face every time DOS ran on the machine properly after being assembled on a separate machine. Q̶u̶e̶u̶e̶ Cue the person looking at source code mentioning something along the lines of "this is real engineering".

tome 11y ago
("Queue the person ..." - "Cue")
- mkhalil 11y ago
  Updated, thanks.
  - yxlx 11y ago
    "Must of" should be "must've".
    - mkhalil 11y ago
      Today I learned: http://grammarist.com/eggcorns/must-of/#comments http://grammarist.com/eggcorns/must-of/#comments Thanks
justinator 11y ago
> Queue the person looking at source code mentioning something along the lines of "this is real engineering". Well it's assembly, so I'm looking at it and thinking, "Yup, that's assembly!"
colejohnson66 11y ago
Operating systems today are still marvelous feats of engineering despite their quirks (such as legacy "features" like ANSI and UCS-2 "Unicode" in Windows), the fact that in the past we could fit an entire operating system AND running applications in one megabyte of RAM is remarkable!
- pklausler 11y ago
  Megabyte? Luxury! Lots of cool systems fit in 64KB, including PDP-11 UNIX.
  - swiley 11y ago
    I thought the PDP-11 had 128k.
    - walshemj 11y ago
      You could get a pdp 11s with a range of memory sizes all of the ones I worked on had less than 128k
- cgh 11y ago
  Like my sibling poster said, a full megabyte would have been the sheerest luxury. After the ROM was mapped into memory on startup, my C64 had 38 kB available for programs. It is flat-out amazing what people did with that memory, including office software, networking and of course games. Keep in mind that the Apple II originally shipped with 4 kB.
  - Tloewald 11y ago
    The Sinclair Cambridge ZX-80 (sold here as the Timex computer or somesuch) shipped with 1kB of RAM. That said, it wasn't really usable for much beyond programmable calculator kinds of stuff. With a 16kB expansion it was pretty awesome.
    - ianmcgowan 11y ago
      My first computer! I was programming in Z-80 assembler, typing in listings from magazines, with no way to save the code. So once the machine was switched off, the program was wiped and it had to be entered again. It's one way to learn the importance of accuracy - after hours of typing hex digits, to have one type cause the program to blow up, and have to start all over.
incepted 11y ago
> Must of have

by mkhalil 11y ago

tome 11y ago

("Queue the person ..." - "Cue")

mkhalil 11y ago
Updated, thanks.
- yxlx 11y ago
  "Must of" should be "must've".
  - mkhalil 11y ago
    Today I learned: http://grammarist.com/eggcorns/must-of/#comments http://grammarist.com/eggcorns/must-of/#comments Thanks

justinator 11y ago

> Queue the person looking at source code mentioning something along the lines of "this is real engineering". Well it's assembly, so I'm looking at it and thinking, "Yup, that's assembly!"

colejohnson66 11y ago

Operating systems today are still marvelous feats of engineering despite their quirks (such as legacy "features" like ANSI and UCS-2 "Unicode" in Windows), the fact that in the past we could fit an entire operating system AND running applications in one megabyte of RAM is remarkable!

pklausler 11y ago
Megabyte? Luxury! Lots of cool systems fit in 64KB, including PDP-11 UNIX.
- swiley 11y ago
  I thought the PDP-11 had 128k.
  - walshemj 11y ago
    You could get a pdp 11s with a range of memory sizes all of the ones I worked on had less than 128k
cgh 11y ago
Like my sibling poster said, a full megabyte would have been the sheerest luxury. After the ROM was mapped into memory on startup, my C64 had 38 kB available for programs. It is flat-out amazing what people did with that memory, including office software, networking and of course games. Keep in mind that the Apple II originally shipped with 4 kB.
- Tloewald 11y ago
  The Sinclair Cambridge ZX-80 (sold here as the Timex computer or somesuch) shipped with 1kB of RAM. That said, it wasn't really usable for much beyond programmable calculator kinds of stuff. With a 16kB expansion it was pretty awesome.
  - ianmcgowan 11y ago
    My first computer! I was programming in Z-80 assembler, typing in listings from magazines, with no way to save the code. So once the machine was switched off, the program was wiped and it had to be entered again. It's one way to learn the importance of accuracy - after hours of typing hex digits, to have one type cause the program to blow up, and have to start all over.

incepted 11y ago

> Must of have