Blech. I learned to program (around ‘99) by implementing the crusty old FCS1.0 format, which allows for aggressively weird wire formats. Our machine was a PDP-1

Blech. I learned to program (around ‘99) by implementing the crusty old FCS1.0 format, which allows for aggressively weird wire formats. Our machine was a PDP-11/72 with its head sawzalled off and custom wire wrap boards dropped in. The “native” format (coming from analog) was 2143 order as a 36b packet. The bits were [8,0:7] (using verilog notation). However, sprinkled randomly in the binary header were chunks of 7- and 8- bit ANSI (packed) and some mutant knockoff 6-bit EBCDIC. The original listing was written by “Jennifer — please call me if you have troubles”, an undergraduate from MIT. It was hand-assembled machine code, in a neat hand in a big blue binder. That code ran non-stop except for a few hurricanes from 1988 until 2008; bug-free as far as I could tell. Jennifer last-name-unknown, you were my idol & my demon! I swore off programming for nearly a year after that.