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Ask HN: On which machine you had best development experience?

• rzzzwilson 9y ago
  For me, it was a TRS-80 clone, a System-80, sold in Australia. I discovered assembly language and desperately wanted a C compiler. I bought the source code for an assembler from somebody, wrote an interpreter for the 8080 mnemonics using a Unisys 1100 mainframe and got the assembler running after bootstrapping it to recognise Z-80 mnemonics. Then I acquired the source code for the small-C compiler[0] and rewrote that in Pascal and modified to to produce Z-80 assembler mnemonics. Using the compiler and assembler I generated a hex file for the small-C compiler. I had access to another Unisys 1100 mainframe that had attached modems, so after writing a little bit of assembler that would read the single bit cassette port, and connecting a friend's modem to the cassette port, I was able to load the compiler hex file and save it as a System-80 executable. Then I rewrote the small-C library in Z-80 assembler and I had a running compiler, which I used to implement a fullscreen text editor. I was incredibly productive on this small and limited machine, mainly, I think, because there were no graphics libraries, etc, in the way, and the programmer was limited only by their imagination. I haven't felt the same rush until learning python 30 years later. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-C