4 ms·
Back when I was a Cub Scout, I learned assembly language on my 6809-based TRS-80 Color Computer. A few years later at my first professional job we ran 300+ user
by unoti 12y ago
Back when I was a Cub Scout, I learned assembly language on my 6809-based TRS-80 Color Computer. A few years later at my first professional job we ran 300+ users on a single 68030 based minicomputers from Alpha Micro. I ended up learning 68000 assembly there, and later, C.
And while that may sound old school, it's not. When I was coming up, every time we talked old school someone would bring up paper tape and punched cards which totally predate me. I wonder where those people are now!
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoI'm right here!
- jacquesm 12y agoAnd here :)
- robomartin 12y agoI was exposed to paper tape for about six months during my first job. I thought it was amazingly cool technology. You could actually read the one's and zero's and enter them by hand if needed into the PDP 11/34's front panel keypad. No head crashes or corrupted sectors. Even if the tape ripped you could reproduce the data.
- wglb 12y agoRight here, still coding.
- krylon 12y ago> every time we talked old school someone would bring up paper tape and punched cards which totally predate me. I wonder where those people are now! I once met this university professor - he is the husband of a friend of my mother's, they had trouble with their computer, I fixed it, and while we sat there, we talked, and he told me that he had in the 1980s a colleague down the hall who carried data around on paper tape. During my training, I knew this guy who still had a stack of punched cards sitting on his desk he used to take notes. Sigh Some part of me is really glad I can now carry gigabytes of data on a flash drive smaller than my finger, but another part of me wants to have been there.
- unoti 12y agoI know the feeling of wanting to be in touch with my technology roots. That desire is what got me into Ham Radio. I highly recommend it, because it's got a healthy mix of practical usefulness combined with old school technology.
- jacquesm 12y agoDid you ever clue in to the CoCo having 64K ram that you could use if you messed with the video/memory controller for a bit to copy the ROM to RAM first? After that you could enable the full 64K and modify the (former) ROM data! Very neat and I used that trick quite a bit to relocate the basic to the highest 16K (giving much more free space in basic) and for all kinds of other tricks requiring more memory. Adding a bunch of new commands/functions to basic was also a fun project.