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>> I personally was not hand-coding assembly in 1989 None at all? 80's C compilers were garbage. Most example code for device drivers (sound cards, video card

>> I personally was not hand-coding assembly in 1989 None at all? 80's C compilers were garbage. Most example code for device drivers (sound cards, video cards, etc) was in ASM back then.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Maybe 80s compilers for MS-DOS/Windows were garbage. Maybe even the ones for Unix were garbage too, and we just didn't care. I've only ever worked on Unix-based systems in my 35 year careers in software, and given that the entire operating system (bar a few low level details) was written in C from the beginning, it has always been rare to fall back to asm for anything unless it was essentially impossible to do the job in C. I've written on the order of a half dozen device drivers in my life for sound cards, motor controllers, DSP boards and sensors, and have never used asm for any of it.
- bluedino 5y ago
  The discussion is about PkZIP which ran on DOS PC's, so your experience in the UNIX world is going to be very different. Life was different in 16-bit, PC XT/AT land with 640k.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Sure. But this started with a comment that said "computing was different back then". Not the same thing at all. Also, note that in 1989, Xenix and others ran quite happily on the sort of hardware you're citing, so MS-DOS is/was the actual "limiting factor".
    - bluedino 5y ago
      The people that were using UNIX workstations back then, even Xenix, compared to MS-DOS was probably 1 to 1000.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        Sure. But MS-DOS didn't define "computing" in 1989. I think it's fine to say something like "pkzip was developed on a platform with a lot of limitations, and you can see some of them in both the program and file format designs". It's quite different to claim that the design of pkzip somehow reflected the general state of computing in 1989 - it just isn't true.
        bluedino 5y ago
        I'd argue that it did, again for 1 out of 1000 people. Remember that the 'rest of the computing world' didn't really catch up to the early UNIX workstations until Windows 2000/XP.

>> I personally was not hand-coding assembly in 1989 None at all? 80's C compilers were garbage. Most example code for device drivers (sound cards, video cards, etc) was in ASM back then.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

Maybe 80s compilers for MS-DOS/Windows were garbage. Maybe even the ones for Unix were garbage too, and we just didn't care. I've only ever worked on Unix-based systems in my 35 year careers in software, and given that the entire operating system (bar a few low level details) was written in C from the beginning, it has always been rare to fall back to asm for anything unless it was essentially impossible to do the job in C. I've written on the order of a half dozen device drivers in my life for sound cards, motor controllers, DSP boards and sensors, and have never used asm for any of it.

bluedino 5y ago
The discussion is about PkZIP which ran on DOS PC's, so your experience in the UNIX world is going to be very different. Life was different in 16-bit, PC XT/AT land with 640k.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Sure. But this started with a comment that said "computing was different back then". Not the same thing at all. Also, note that in 1989, Xenix and others ran quite happily on the sort of hardware you're citing, so MS-DOS is/was the actual "limiting factor".
  - bluedino 5y ago
    The people that were using UNIX workstations back then, even Xenix, compared to MS-DOS was probably 1 to 1000.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      Sure. But MS-DOS didn't define "computing" in 1989. I think it's fine to say something like "pkzip was developed on a platform with a lot of limitations, and you can see some of them in both the program and file format designs". It's quite different to claim that the design of pkzip somehow reflected the general state of computing in 1989 - it just isn't true.
      - bluedino 5y ago
        I'd argue that it did, again for 1 out of 1000 people. Remember that the 'rest of the computing world' didn't really catch up to the early UNIX workstations until Windows 2000/XP.