4 ms·

This was definitely ahead of its time. Too bad the source code is probably lost, would have been an interesting read.

• zozbot234 5y ago
  These things would've been written in assembly code back in the day. So that's your source code. In this case, it looks like they used a custom interpreted VM.
  • postexitus 5y ago
    They still used Assembler - imagine looking at any code today without comments or variable names. Reading Assembly without source code is exactly like that.
    • flohofwoe 5y ago
      It was and still is fairly common to disassemble and annoate machine code dumps (which were written in assembly) so that it becomes human readable again. For instance in the 80's, the main selling point of the "Intern" books about various home computer models on the German market was the annotated ROM assembly listing. Each memory location and jump target got a descriptive label, and each line of assembly got a comment describing what it does in the context of the surrounding code. Due to the descriptive comments, this was actually more readable than most modern code bases written in high level languages I've seen. It's also much more readable than assembly code which was produced by a compiler from a high level languages (e.g. what you see on godbolt.org), because the code was written by a human in assembly in the first place. Here's a 'modern' example for the ZX Spectrum ROM which just turned up as first result when googling: https://skoolkid.github.io/rom/ https://skoolkid.github.io/rom/
  • WoodenChair 5y ago
    > These things would've been written in assembly code back in the day. So that's your source code. In this case, it looks like they used a custom interpreted VM. According to the Byte magazine interview about VisiOn, it was mostly C with some assembly.