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There was a freely available FORTRAN on the Fred Fish Amiga disks in the late 80s. It came with a weird license---free for everything, but it couldn't be used f

• jacquesm 3y ago
  Oh cool, I never knew that. 386 flat mode was easy enough, but only djgpp unlocked that properly, everything else was a hodgepodge of the weirdest memory models. I remember making a bootloader for my own OS using TurboC that somehow had to fish four files from a minix based filesystem and dump them in memory at certain addresses and then switch to flat mode and start executing the kernel which would then initialize the system properly. That was some really weird mixed mode voodoo to switch back and forth between protected mode and real mode to be able to both use BIOS calls to fetch blocks from disk and to be able to park the data in the right spots in contiguous memory. Very tricky stuff to get right, it took me forever before I had the first indication that something was executing after the inevitable hail Mary jump to the first instruction in the loaded kernel. But I got it to work. I actually had a guitar footpedal hooked to the reset button because it took me too many dives under the desk to recover from a crash. That was a very slow development cycle without any chance of debugging. At some point I had 8 leds hooked up to the printer port to use some 'out' opcodes to tell me where I had gotten to in the code. Poor mans emulator :)