7 ms·

Ask HN: Trying to find a post about some OS developer in the 80s coding by hand

46 points by lexoj 2y ago

Hi, as the title says, I tried everything, checking my bookmarks and chatgpt but cannot find a post about someone telling the story of some engineer using pencil and paper for a month or so and then typing the code in one go and it worked flawlessly. He was writing some niche OS system and the blog was a collection of posts about that system. I also remember from the discussion thread that the developer had passed away.

josefritzishere 2y ago
I have the same problem finding an article about meta problem solving. The writer compared it to skiing or judo or some sport. No combination of keywords conjures up the right article in search.
The-Old-Hacker 2y ago
Have you tried using Hacker News Search? https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com
- lexoj 2y ago
  No luck as I dont have a keyword in mind of the title. I remember in the blogpost that in the very end he had to fix 1-2 typos and everything worked correctly. The blog (in old school design) had a lot of posts and pictures of that era and the people involved building that OS.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
TowerTall 2y ago
I couldn't find the exact post, but it might be related to the story of Terry Davis, the creator of TempleOS. He was known for his unique approach to coding and his dedication to his project. Unfortunately, Terry Davis passed away in 2018. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%20Terry%20Davis%20TempleOS&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... It can also be Mel https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mel https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mel
- lexoj 2y ago
  Unfortunetaly is not any of them. Title was not very descriptive, a keen of "My friend Andre", but didnt find anything with those so maybe I misremember the name.
- reverendsteveii 2y ago
  I didn't think this was Mel, but I also came here to talk about Mel. Hand-selecting memory addresses to ensure that the next thing you need is always the next thing about to be read from disk is just craftsmanship on an entirely different level.
lexoj 2y ago
I hope @dang remembers? :)
romanhn 2y ago
This looks pretty close to your description: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342143 EDIT: Looks like the parent post entered the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). Not only did all the timestamps get rewritten, but apparently I can now edit this day-old comment :) Interestingly, it does show the correct timestamp when editing. Off-topic, but thought it's interesting behavior worth mentioning.
- dcminter 2y ago
  Oh that surely must be it! Even if it isn't though, that is a neat little anecdote and I'm glad I've had the chance to read it - I hadn't seen it before.
  - lexoj 2y ago
    Yep it was it :)
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  Reading the original article, I can't help recalling what David Cutler said in an interview, that whenever he completed a piece of code, he always ran it in his head a few times to make sure that nothing could go wrong, and then submitted (presumably for testing). His NT code had very few bugs as per say. I think 10x programmers are indeed usually smarter than ordinary programmers. They don't work out 10x amount of higher quality code, or 10x quality of code, but work in COMPLETELY DIFFERENT DOMAINS -- OS, Compilers, Emulators, etc., they simply solve tougher problems. And they also have the capacity to hold a lot of code in their brains. This is so amazing. I usually lost myself after just maybe a couple of dozen lines, or a few function hops. Admittedly, my program uses more libraries so TBH the brain trace just stopped whenever it went into a 2000 line long library function. But my project is more trivial than theirs.
  - Matthyze 2y ago
    There was a blog post the other day arguing that great developers aren't 10x but infinity-x. It sounds ridiculous, but their point was that great developers don't simply program faster but solve problems other developers are entirely unable to solve. And that makes sense to me. It's the difference between an AI boot camp graduate and someone with an ML PhD. They might apply a sklearn function at the same speed, but as soon as complex problems appear, the former hits an unsurpassable wall. edit: https://www.seangoedecke.com/weak-engineers/ https://www.seangoedecke.com/weak-engineers/
Dracophoenix 2y ago
Was it the Story of Mel? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395589 He also passed away relatively recently. https://melsloop.com/docs/the-story-of-mel/pages/mel-kaye-cv https://melsloop.com/docs/the-story-of-mel/pages/mel-kaye-cv
Clubber 2y ago
We used to have to do this in high school in AP CS in the early 90s. All the tests were to write such and such with pencil and paper. We would get marked off for syntactical mistakes. I had totally forgotten about this. I still have the PASCAL book.
rawfan 2y ago
I remember Mohammed Said (of Laravel fame) telling this story to Matt Stauffer in the Laravel Podcast. He wrote is programs at home on pen and paper and went to the public library to try them out.
cbm-vic-20 2y ago
They used to have print templates for this sort of thing. Here's an example from the 1960s: https://try-mts.com/system-360-assembly-language-introduction/ https://try-mts.com/system-360-assembly-language-introductio...
busterarm 2y ago
This isn't really that uncommon of a thing. Just talk to your ex-Soviet friends. I worked with a Network Engineer whose computer time in uni was limited, so he did exactly this.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- nottorp 2y ago
  In Romania when I was a kid I had access to computers at some sort of kids' club only once or twice per week for a couple hours. So I wrote BASIC programs in the back of my school notebooks and typed in some of them when I got to the computer.
jgrahamc 2y ago
This was pretty common back then. I don't recall the post you are talking about but I wrote a little about my own experience here: https://blog.jgc.org/2013/04/how-i-coded-in-1985.html https://blog.jgc.org/2013/04/how-i-coded-in-1985.html
- snowfarthing 2y ago
  When I was in college in 1995/96 (and later 1999/2000), this was somewhat how I programmed too. While I had access to computers at both home and school, my access to them were somewhat limited, and the tools I had at my disposal were very limited (especially at home). I cannot help but reflect on how my approach was a "hybrid" between both pencil-and-paper and modern-cli-and-ide -- we were coming out of the age of really simple home computers, but not yet in the age of super fast computers with large monitors.
mrpippy 2y ago
I think there’s a story in the Bill Gates biography “Hard Drive” about when he flies to MITS in New Mexico to show off BASIC (I think), then realizes he forgot to write a bootloader, so does it on the plane on a yellow legal pad. Toggles it into the Altair during the demo and it works on the first try. (Might have a lot of details wrong)
6510 2y ago
Ah yes, the web burns shortly after we shoot it and we left no bread crumbs to navigate the forest. It is true! We used pens, pencils and graph paper to write down and draw all kinds of things while using the computer. Paper has very robust IO. A single note book can hold as many glyphs as ship full of clay tablets but after 40 years you have no idea where you've put it.
pdw 2y ago
IIRC, Dijkstra's THE operating system for the Electrologica X8 was completed before the hardware was available. It was the first multitasking operating system (albeit with a fixed set of tasks) and the first use of semaphores. Supposedly the initial version only had trivial coding errors.
willtemperley 2y ago
Turing and Champernowne coded Turochamp by hand in 1948, but never executed it on a computer. The instructions were however executed with Turing as the computer: https://www.history.com/news/in-1950-alan-turing-created-a-chess-computer-program-that-prefigured-a-i https://www.history.com/news/in-1950-alan-turing-created-a-c...
whalesalad 2y ago
why does this make me immediately think of templeOS
WillAdams 2y ago
Does anyone know if the original source as diagrams and pencil code is preserved somewhere? It looks as if some of them might have been re-drawn for: https://www.multicians.org/nss.html https://www.multicians.org/nss.html and this is the source code in question? https://www.multicians.org/vtoc_man.html https://www.multicians.org/vtoc_man.html
bryanwi 2y ago
I worked with David Cutler and he very much did what he described doing. Others on the kernel team followed similar practices. There is code Dave and I modified together where we then sat and audited it together. This was all code in the heart of an OS - thread switching, interrupt dispatch, synchronization mechanisms - things where even the most rare and exotic error might actually occur and cause a disaster. But some hazard/cost computation is needed. There was an article in the '90s about a team doing software for an arm for space work (maybe on the shuttle) - they were hyper careful. I figured out that if all of windows had been made at that rate out of code output it would take 100 years to finish and would cost several trillion dollars. Not long after that that space arm suffered some kind of software failure, in space. Wasn't for want of effort by the dev team. Remember that many errors arise from things outside the code you wrote/studied - some other code corrupted something, buggy behavoir in hardware, and so forth. As for coding by hand, simulating by hand, flow graphing by hand, I don't think those were all that unusual, just one person took it to extremes and wrote about it.
bigfatkitten 2y ago
This was extremely common in the 80s. I've got a pile of notebooks full of hand assembled Z80 code that my dad wrote in pencil for the Exidy Sorcerer, which he got in 1979. It was easier to do that, and reason about your program on paper before running it on the actual computer.

46 points by lexoj 2y ago

josefritzishere 2y ago

I have the same problem finding an article about meta problem solving. The writer compared it to skiing or judo or some sport. No combination of keywords conjures up the right article in search.

The-Old-Hacker 2y ago

Have you tried using Hacker News Search? https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com

lexoj 2y ago
No luck as I dont have a keyword in mind of the title. I remember in the blogpost that in the very end he had to fix 1-2 typos and everything worked correctly. The blog (in old school design) had a lot of posts and pictures of that era and the people involved building that OS.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

TowerTall 2y ago

I couldn't find the exact post, but it might be related to the story of Terry Davis, the creator of TempleOS. He was known for his unique approach to coding and his dedication to his project. Unfortunately, Terry Davis passed away in 2018. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%20Terry%20Davis%20TempleOS&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... It can also be Mel https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mel https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mel

lexoj 2y ago
Unfortunetaly is not any of them. Title was not very descriptive, a keen of "My friend Andre", but didnt find anything with those so maybe I misremember the name.
reverendsteveii 2y ago
I didn't think this was Mel, but I also came here to talk about Mel. Hand-selecting memory addresses to ensure that the next thing you need is always the next thing about to be read from disk is just craftsmanship on an entirely different level.

lexoj 2y ago

I hope @dang remembers? :)

romanhn 2y ago

This looks pretty close to your description: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342143 EDIT: Looks like the parent post entered the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). Not only did all the timestamps get rewritten, but apparently I can now edit this day-old comment :) Interestingly, it does show the correct timestamp when editing. Off-topic, but thought it's interesting behavior worth mentioning.

dcminter 2y ago
Oh that surely must be it! Even if it isn't though, that is a neat little anecdote and I'm glad I've had the chance to read it - I hadn't seen it before.
- lexoj 2y ago
  Yep it was it :)
markus_zhang 2y ago
Reading the original article, I can't help recalling what David Cutler said in an interview, that whenever he completed a piece of code, he always ran it in his head a few times to make sure that nothing could go wrong, and then submitted (presumably for testing). His NT code had very few bugs as per say. I think 10x programmers are indeed usually smarter than ordinary programmers. They don't work out 10x amount of higher quality code, or 10x quality of code, but work in COMPLETELY DIFFERENT DOMAINS -- OS, Compilers, Emulators, etc., they simply solve tougher problems. And they also have the capacity to hold a lot of code in their brains. This is so amazing. I usually lost myself after just maybe a couple of dozen lines, or a few function hops. Admittedly, my program uses more libraries so TBH the brain trace just stopped whenever it went into a 2000 line long library function. But my project is more trivial than theirs.
- Matthyze 2y ago
  There was a blog post the other day arguing that great developers aren't 10x but infinity-x. It sounds ridiculous, but their point was that great developers don't simply program faster but solve problems other developers are entirely unable to solve. And that makes sense to me. It's the difference between an AI boot camp graduate and someone with an ML PhD. They might apply a sklearn function at the same speed, but as soon as complex problems appear, the former hits an unsurpassable wall. edit: https://www.seangoedecke.com/weak-engineers/ https://www.seangoedecke.com/weak-engineers/

Dracophoenix 2y ago

Was it the Story of Mel? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395589 He also passed away relatively recently. https://melsloop.com/docs/the-story-of-mel/pages/mel-kaye-cv https://melsloop.com/docs/the-story-of-mel/pages/mel-kaye-cv

Clubber 2y ago

We used to have to do this in high school in AP CS in the early 90s. All the tests were to write such and such with pencil and paper. We would get marked off for syntactical mistakes. I had totally forgotten about this. I still have the PASCAL book.

rawfan 2y ago

I remember Mohammed Said (of Laravel fame) telling this story to Matt Stauffer in the Laravel Podcast. He wrote is programs at home on pen and paper and went to the public library to try them out.

cbm-vic-20 2y ago

They used to have print templates for this sort of thing. Here's an example from the 1960s: https://try-mts.com/system-360-assembly-language-introduction/ https://try-mts.com/system-360-assembly-language-introductio...

busterarm 2y ago

This isn't really that uncommon of a thing. Just talk to your ex-Soviet friends. I worked with a Network Engineer whose computer time in uni was limited, so he did exactly this.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nottorp 2y ago
In Romania when I was a kid I had access to computers at some sort of kids' club only once or twice per week for a couple hours. So I wrote BASIC programs in the back of my school notebooks and typed in some of them when I got to the computer.

jgrahamc 2y ago

This was pretty common back then. I don't recall the post you are talking about but I wrote a little about my own experience here: https://blog.jgc.org/2013/04/how-i-coded-in-1985.html https://blog.jgc.org/2013/04/how-i-coded-in-1985.html

snowfarthing 2y ago
When I was in college in 1995/96 (and later 1999/2000), this was somewhat how I programmed too. While I had access to computers at both home and school, my access to them were somewhat limited, and the tools I had at my disposal were very limited (especially at home). I cannot help but reflect on how my approach was a "hybrid" between both pencil-and-paper and modern-cli-and-ide -- we were coming out of the age of really simple home computers, but not yet in the age of super fast computers with large monitors.

mrpippy 2y ago

I think there’s a story in the Bill Gates biography “Hard Drive” about when he flies to MITS in New Mexico to show off BASIC (I think), then realizes he forgot to write a bootloader, so does it on the plane on a yellow legal pad. Toggles it into the Altair during the demo and it works on the first try. (Might have a lot of details wrong)

6510 2y ago

Ah yes, the web burns shortly after we shoot it and we left no bread crumbs to navigate the forest. It is true! We used pens, pencils and graph paper to write down and draw all kinds of things while using the computer. Paper has very robust IO. A single note book can hold as many glyphs as ship full of clay tablets but after 40 years you have no idea where you've put it.

pdw 2y ago

IIRC, Dijkstra's THE operating system for the Electrologica X8 was completed before the hardware was available. It was the first multitasking operating system (albeit with a fixed set of tasks) and the first use of semaphores. Supposedly the initial version only had trivial coding errors.

willtemperley 2y ago

Turing and Champernowne coded Turochamp by hand in 1948, but never executed it on a computer. The instructions were however executed with Turing as the computer: https://www.history.com/news/in-1950-alan-turing-created-a-chess-computer-program-that-prefigured-a-i https://www.history.com/news/in-1950-alan-turing-created-a-c...

whalesalad 2y ago

why does this make me immediately think of templeOS

WillAdams 2y ago

Does anyone know if the original source as diagrams and pencil code is preserved somewhere? It looks as if some of them might have been re-drawn for: https://www.multicians.org/nss.html https://www.multicians.org/nss.html and this is the source code in question? https://www.multicians.org/vtoc_man.html https://www.multicians.org/vtoc_man.html

bryanwi 2y ago

I worked with David Cutler and he very much did what he described doing. Others on the kernel team followed similar practices. There is code Dave and I modified together where we then sat and audited it together. This was all code in the heart of an OS - thread switching, interrupt dispatch, synchronization mechanisms - things where even the most rare and exotic error might actually occur and cause a disaster. But some hazard/cost computation is needed. There was an article in the '90s about a team doing software for an arm for space work (maybe on the shuttle) - they were hyper careful. I figured out that if all of windows had been made at that rate out of code output it would take 100 years to finish and would cost several trillion dollars. Not long after that that space arm suffered some kind of software failure, in space. Wasn't for want of effort by the dev team. Remember that many errors arise from things outside the code you wrote/studied - some other code corrupted something, buggy behavoir in hardware, and so forth. As for coding by hand, simulating by hand, flow graphing by hand, I don't think those were all that unusual, just one person took it to extremes and wrote about it.

bigfatkitten 2y ago

This was extremely common in the 80s. I've got a pile of notebooks full of hand assembled Z80 code that my dad wrote in pencil for the Exidy Sorcerer, which he got in 1979. It was easier to do that, and reason about your program on paper before running it on the actual computer.