Another fascinating concept of old computers is about 10 years before FOSS and about 30 years before github we used to buy strange telephone book sized tomes wi

Another fascinating concept of old computers is about 10 years before FOSS and about 30 years before github we used to buy strange telephone book sized tomes with titles like "Journey to the Center of the ROM" and they were commented disassemblies of the rom that shipped with the BASIC from the linked article, for example. On the theory that you'd learn yourself a little something by studying how an "old timer" with 2 or even 3 years of Z80 assembly experience wrote a basic interpreter, because you were a noob with like 6 months experience. And they had similar books for other system software like various disk operating systems (not the IBM product from many years in the future) Coolest thing about those books is they're up on archive.org just like the article's BASIC books. Now... one thing to realize is bits cost money back then so self modifying code was "clever" not insane. And an old timer having maybe two whole years of experience meant that the code probably looks extremely amateurish today. But, it worked, and back then the only way you got to patch bugs was to sign a contract for new masked roms and then physically install them, in other words it didn't happen, so its a good thing we only had 4K eproms and so on because that's only 4K possible things to be a bug, um, sorta. Kids these days don't realize in the old days software was like un-upgradable firmware today. Some dude screws up the key debounce routine in the rom of your TRS-80 model I, well you better like it that way, or like patching manually after very reboot... Something I was just thinking about today is noobs today must have it extremely rough being dumped into advanced data structures and RTOS and interrupts and multithreaded programming and GUI interfaces right at the start. In the old days life was easy because stuff you wouldn't understand as a noob didn't exist, or at least you could mostly ignore it. Nobody got confused about MALLOC memory on a TRS80 until they knew what it meant and why they wanted it because it was a model 3000 running linux 1.0, but in 1981 the whole topic couldn't confuse noobs because it wasn't there.