5 ms·

68k was the easiest 'language' I ever learned. You had the reference manual, the instruction timings, no middleware, it was awesome and I made my future career

68k was the easiest 'language' I ever learned. You had the reference manual, the instruction timings, no middleware, it was awesome and I made my future career from the age of 12 by writing Amiga / ST stuff. Best thing is - it was me against the machine. If anybody did something that moved more sprites than I did, or did better parallax, it was because they were better than I. No driver incompatibility to blame. I loved programming in 1984, it made me tolerate less shit and produce better code than people who were less fortunate to be born later. I miss those days :(

segmondy 8y ago
There are still jobs for asm, C/C++ programmers where dependency on external libraries are not needed. I do understand tho, I miss those days too. My first 68k system was a sun 380.
freedomben 8y ago
I feel ya. The 68k days were glorious indeed. I'm sure things weren't really as good as I remember them, but man the nostalgia pull is real. I agree with the Raspberry Pi people, it's a lot harder to hack on stuff than it used to be.
- mrguyorama 8y ago
  I completely missed the heyday of microprocessor programming, but I wholeheartedly disagree that hacking on things is harder than it used to be. TI-84 calculators are $100 and let you write Z80 assembly, 68k microprocessors are available for less than $10 from any number of sources, easily available documentation and 30+ years of experience to draw on, freely available plans for whole systems so that you don't actually have to figure anything out yourself, or you can bypass all that and build your own processor in a circuit simulator, like I did, or learn HDL and buy a cheap FPGA and run it for real, or use something like python to control your parallel port with single lines of code connected to a webserver if you don't mind being silly. Heck, if I want to, I can even massively hack things, write kernel drivers for linux OR windows, do basically whatever I want. Some of them are harder than others, and some are more intended than others, and some require more time than others, but the world of hacking is still one of possibility. Pretty much the only locked down systems are smartphones, which sucks, but I just bought a raspberry Pi zero W for 10 dollars, which is incredible compared to the Basic Stamp 2 micro controller that cost $120 just a decade ago. Literally the only difficult (at least IMO) thing for hacking whatever you want is analog circuits. I still massively struggle with that.
  - freedomben 8y ago
    Good points. When I think of hackability tho, I think about the devices and "toys" that I already have. Back in the day you just hacked on what you already had. Also, most of the time you were a kid or teenager that couldn't even afford the 10 bucks for the pi, so unless your parents bought one, you were out of luck. I had to take apart my dad's VCR and computers and stuff in order to learn. But for an older person, you make some great points.
larsbrinkhoff 8y ago
I agree, I had a similar experience. But you didn't have an Amiga or ST in 1984, did you?
- sofaofthedamned 8y ago
  You're correct, my years are slightly off. But I am old so forget things!
pjmlp 8y ago
> No driver incompatibility to blame. Actually, at least on the 8 bit machines we had ROM firmware to blame. I remember some ZX Spectrum issues depended on the actual model one had, which were un-officially documented on the ROM Disassembly books.
- Jare 8y ago
  You could get in trouble if your code relied on specific contents of the ROM, for example to use it as deterministic random numbers. Also, installing a Kempston Joystick hardware interface would mess up the default way to set up interrupts, but a couple of years into the Speccy's life, everyone knew how to do it safely. Those two are the ones I remember.
danmaz74 8y ago
Oh my, the memories. I remember when I was fascinated with animated 3d plots of z = f(x,y) functions which I saw on TV, and when the only decently performant way I found to render those plots myself on my Amiga 500 was to build my own compiler of math functions into 68K machine code from my C program. The machine code was the easy part - what cost me so much time was reinventing on my own a parser without knowing anything about parsers theory and AST (I was 16 then). Today, you type your function inside Google search and you get a rotating 3d plot rendered in real time in js inside the browser... lol.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  For younger generations, C is a synonym for fast code, yet on those days it was quite common that asm { ... } blocks would be like 80% of function bodies. I shared a similar experience regarding parsing also with your age, got a compiler development book at the local library, but the T diagrams of bootstrapping process and how to use automatons only made sense years later. I ended up resorting to common sense and a very lousy parsing algorithm. However my goal was pretty basic, doing syntax highlighting of Turbo Pascal code for printing.
  - danmaz74 8y ago
    Yeah, commons sense and quite lousy parsing was my solution too. Only years later I learned how much easier the proper solution would have been - but my local library didn't have any coding book back then :)
tomxor 8y ago
> I made my future career from the age of 12 by writing Amiga / ST stuff [...] I loved programming in 1984 My first computer was an ST in the late 90s! it was a bit of a franken model that my dad assembled, basically the best bits of various STs, I loved it. It was my favorite computer even in that era. I was of a similarly young age but didn't get beyond BASIC back then :), still I feel like I learnt a lot more than my friends with their more expensive windows boxes of the time. I wish I took the programming further back then, I ended up rediscovering it later in life instead. I feel like I have some strange kind of false pseudo nostalgia for these machines though since I discovered them almost two decades later :P

segmondy 8y ago

There are still jobs for asm, C/C++ programmers where dependency on external libraries are not needed. I do understand tho, I miss those days too. My first 68k system was a sun 380.

freedomben 8y ago

I feel ya. The 68k days were glorious indeed. I'm sure things weren't really as good as I remember them, but man the nostalgia pull is real. I agree with the Raspberry Pi people, it's a lot harder to hack on stuff than it used to be.

mrguyorama 8y ago
I completely missed the heyday of microprocessor programming, but I wholeheartedly disagree that hacking on things is harder than it used to be. TI-84 calculators are $100 and let you write Z80 assembly, 68k microprocessors are available for less than $10 from any number of sources, easily available documentation and 30+ years of experience to draw on, freely available plans for whole systems so that you don't actually have to figure anything out yourself, or you can bypass all that and build your own processor in a circuit simulator, like I did, or learn HDL and buy a cheap FPGA and run it for real, or use something like python to control your parallel port with single lines of code connected to a webserver if you don't mind being silly. Heck, if I want to, I can even massively hack things, write kernel drivers for linux OR windows, do basically whatever I want. Some of them are harder than others, and some are more intended than others, and some require more time than others, but the world of hacking is still one of possibility. Pretty much the only locked down systems are smartphones, which sucks, but I just bought a raspberry Pi zero W for 10 dollars, which is incredible compared to the Basic Stamp 2 micro controller that cost $120 just a decade ago. Literally the only difficult (at least IMO) thing for hacking whatever you want is analog circuits. I still massively struggle with that.
- freedomben 8y ago
  Good points. When I think of hackability tho, I think about the devices and "toys" that I already have. Back in the day you just hacked on what you already had. Also, most of the time you were a kid or teenager that couldn't even afford the 10 bucks for the pi, so unless your parents bought one, you were out of luck. I had to take apart my dad's VCR and computers and stuff in order to learn. But for an older person, you make some great points.

larsbrinkhoff 8y ago

I agree, I had a similar experience. But you didn't have an Amiga or ST in 1984, did you?

sofaofthedamned 8y ago
You're correct, my years are slightly off. But I am old so forget things!

pjmlp 8y ago

> No driver incompatibility to blame. Actually, at least on the 8 bit machines we had ROM firmware to blame. I remember some ZX Spectrum issues depended on the actual model one had, which were un-officially documented on the ROM Disassembly books.

Jare 8y ago
You could get in trouble if your code relied on specific contents of the ROM, for example to use it as deterministic random numbers. Also, installing a Kempston Joystick hardware interface would mess up the default way to set up interrupts, but a couple of years into the Speccy's life, everyone knew how to do it safely. Those two are the ones I remember.

danmaz74 8y ago

Oh my, the memories. I remember when I was fascinated with animated 3d plots of z = f(x,y) functions which I saw on TV, and when the only decently performant way I found to render those plots myself on my Amiga 500 was to build my own compiler of math functions into 68K machine code from my C program. The machine code was the easy part - what cost me so much time was reinventing on my own a parser without knowing anything about parsers theory and AST (I was 16 then). Today, you type your function inside Google search and you get a rotating 3d plot rendered in real time in js inside the browser... lol.

pjmlp 8y ago
For younger generations, C is a synonym for fast code, yet on those days it was quite common that asm { ... } blocks would be like 80% of function bodies. I shared a similar experience regarding parsing also with your age, got a compiler development book at the local library, but the T diagrams of bootstrapping process and how to use automatons only made sense years later. I ended up resorting to common sense and a very lousy parsing algorithm. However my goal was pretty basic, doing syntax highlighting of Turbo Pascal code for printing.
- danmaz74 8y ago
  Yeah, commons sense and quite lousy parsing was my solution too. Only years later I learned how much easier the proper solution would have been - but my local library didn't have any coding book back then :)

tomxor 8y ago

> I made my future career from the age of 12 by writing Amiga / ST stuff [...] I loved programming in 1984 My first computer was an ST in the late 90s! it was a bit of a franken model that my dad assembled, basically the best bits of various STs, I loved it. It was my favorite computer even in that era. I was of a similarly young age but didn't get beyond BASIC back then :), still I feel like I learnt a lot more than my friends with their more expensive windows boxes of the time. I wish I took the programming further back then, I ended up rediscovering it later in life instead. I feel like I have some strange kind of false pseudo nostalgia for these machines though since I discovered them almost two decades later :P