3 ms·

You had to read the documentation thoroughly and hack around to master a language/product/library. You couldn't get the gist from a YouTube tutorial and then se

You had to read the documentation thoroughly and hack around to master a language/product/library. You couldn't get the gist from a YouTube tutorial and then search StackOverflow or Usenet for your specific problem. We barely had O'Reilly books. If you were doing C on PC/Mac (after installing from 10 floppies) and you messed up a pointer, your machine froze.

gavinray 4y ago
> If you were doing C on PC/Mac (after installing from 10 floppies) and you messed up a pointer, your machine froze. I've always been curious about this. I figured that if you were manually touching memory in systems languages there was a chance you could crash your system Why doesn't this happen now, what changed? And could you potentially fry even your hardware in the old days?
- RockyMcNuts 4y ago
  memory protection is what changed. there are different ways to set it up and others here will be much more knowledgeable, but the OS works in conjunction with CPU features to generate an error if a program attempts to access memory not allocated to it. before (I think) the 386, microprocessors didn't support proper memory protection, any OS that attempted to run multiple programs was at risk that one program would crash the system. You might see the 'bomb' dialog on Mac or it might just freeze. Blue screen I think started with Windows 95. Until (I think) Windows NT and Mac OSX the OS didn't implement memory protection. Original Mac had cooperative multitasking, each program was supposed to run in a loop that yielded to the OS so it could e.g. move the mouse pointer, process clicks. Of course at that time DOS didn't have any multitasking. although there was the infamous "TSR" terminate and stay resident feature which was used by e.g. DesqView to allow you to switch programs via a hotkey. typically software can't fry hardware, even the famous 'halt and catch fire' instruction didn't literally cause a fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing...

gavinray 4y ago

> If you were doing C on PC/Mac (after installing from 10 floppies) and you messed up a pointer, your machine froze. I've always been curious about this. I figured that if you were manually touching memory in systems languages there was a chance you could crash your system Why doesn't this happen now, what changed? And could you potentially fry even your hardware in the old days?

RockyMcNuts 4y ago
memory protection is what changed. there are different ways to set it up and others here will be much more knowledgeable, but the OS works in conjunction with CPU features to generate an error if a program attempts to access memory not allocated to it. before (I think) the 386, microprocessors didn't support proper memory protection, any OS that attempted to run multiple programs was at risk that one program would crash the system. You might see the 'bomb' dialog on Mac or it might just freeze. Blue screen I think started with Windows 95. Until (I think) Windows NT and Mac OSX the OS didn't implement memory protection. Original Mac had cooperative multitasking, each program was supposed to run in a loop that yielded to the OS so it could e.g. move the mouse pointer, process clicks. Of course at that time DOS didn't have any multitasking. although there was the infamous "TSR" terminate and stay resident feature which was used by e.g. DesqView to allow you to switch programs via a hotkey. typically software can't fry hardware, even the famous 'halt and catch fire' instruction didn't literally cause a fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing...