Do we have any old school programmers here?

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Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 12:07 pm

I used to play around with this thing 30 years ago:

Coding in hexadecimal assembler, that was a challenge!

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:02 pm

I programmed in C and assembly (shudder). I probably couldn't do anything at this point. Confused

Oh, I was not a very good programmer though.

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:06 pm

Doesn�t count, but when I was in school in the late 70s we had one computer, that had been built by hand (I assume from a kit) by two of the teachers. We had one computer class a week when the entire form was supposed to share this advanced piece of technology. I don�t remember it even having a screen and when we saved a programme it got printed out on a ribbon of paper with holes punched in it, which you then had to keep until the following week�s lesson.

A friend and I persuaded one of the more academically inclined members of the class to come up with a VERY simple golf programme, which we duly printed off on the ribbon. For the rest of the year when the teacher came round to see what we were doing we�d show this to him and he�d go away happy, leaving us to get back to our games of hangman or whatever. He was brilliant at maths and stuff but didn�t have a clue otherwise. He was also slightly eccentric and very hump backed with a big nose, thick glasses and a strange voice, which added to the gaiety of life.

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 6:13 pm

Did some stuff on PL1, Basic, FORTRAN, and COBOL in college. I hated those damn punch cards. People would always get in the box and mix them around for a joke. I was all-world on "nested if" strings!

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 7:23 pm

Quote:

Doesn�t count, but when I was in school in the late 70s we had one computer, that had been built by hand

@rohrschach: that wasn't an IMSAI 8080 by any chance? that you booted by flipping those big flat switches?

I too cut my real teeth on a C64 (Basic, assembler). The control over sound and graphics (sprites!) was heaven.

Quote:

^^ ^^ Darn the C64 tape drive.

Who remembers the frightening clackety clacking of the 1541 disk drive?

The machine is long gone, snif. I think I'll go download one of the emulators....excuse me...

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 22 Dec 2007 Posts: 12

i think the only thing i could manage at that time was the zx spectrum 48k........ again along the "10 print (insert comand here)" .... saying that, as far as i'm concerned some of the greatest games ever were released at that time.. dan dare, jet set willy, and my personal favorite, jack the nipper!

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 7:39 pm

Okay, you twisted my figurative arm, Lotta...

I knew Shiver under a different name (but didn't realize it until yesterday) back around 1987 until about 1990 or so when we were both subscribed to a (mainly) Commodore 64 network that ran in the UK (Compunet) and attracted many of the demo-creators, coders, musicians, bitmap artists, and associated nerds of that kind.

I knew I had heard Shiver's real name before somewhere but I hadn't made the association until I read (well, re-read several times) the first post in this thread. It was like the cartoon lightbulb-over-the-head moment when I realized where I had heard the name before and that we had been irregular correspondents on Compunet's mail system. He first contacted me when I had written a rather flattering review of one of his demos that he had uploaded to Compunet when I was doing review duties for one of the groups there.

Compunet was the place to be during that time if you were into the UK C64 demo scene, and there is a very distinctive fondness for it by most of the people who were on it at the time. Sure, it had its problems and the extra-long downtime during the legendary "upgrade" jaded almost everyone against the thing, but looking back... good memories.

I guess you had to be there.

419Eater Admin Joined: 30 Sep 2003 Posts: 7469

Hey! You left out the "legend" bit. No more money for you Smile

PS: I'll reply to you PM later!

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:45 pm

Hmmm, ZX81 girl here, handbuilt with the help of my brother-in-law, thus saving a full �15 on the purchase price.

I lusted after a 16k RAM pack, but sadly never aspired to one.

Now I do a bit of MS Basic to tweak small databases, but nothing very interesting or clever. I guess I wouldn't be doing that if it hadn't been for the ZX81 though, which, if nothing else, gave me confidence in the brave new world of technology!

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:56 pm

learned PASCAL in school in the Late 80's early 90's. Big USER of game cracks.... could not program my way out of a paper bag now though.

Do know how to use my blackberry Smile

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 12:36 am

bohigal wrote:

Who remembers the frightening clackety clacking of the 1541 disk drive?

I do. In fact I still have the machine in my basement. One of these weekends I'll clear some space on my basement pc bench and set it up again. God how many hours did I waste playing games on that thing??? Very Happy

I still have 6 or 7 plastic bins filled with (now I guess it would be pirated Embarassed

) 5 1/4" disks full of games that my brother copied from his friends.

LOAD "*",8,1

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 1:17 am

Back when as a student, I was a bit suspicious that somebody other than myself in the apartment was using my computer when I wasn't home.

Since I knew they were too techno-tardy to use a boot disk, I launched a nice little program from the HD boot sector that demanded a password. I compiled all possible passwords right into into the program (coded +128) and had the program read along with the keyboard input without a screen echo.

Any mistake (while typing!), space, or return immediately caused a tiny log file to be written on the disk, echoed 'Fuck off you bastard !' on the screen, and called this routine, (that boot-strap interrupt was valid at the time):

Code:

cseg
public kill
kill:
push bp
mov bp,sp
int 25
pop bp
ret 0
end

I caught the guy cold. Twisted Evil

Ah, the fun old days staying up all night trying to figure out why there was a endless loop, having to reboot, and reboot, ...

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 3:08 am

Yeh I used to create some crappy demos on the C64 using basic and assembler - was quite young when I first got it - maybe 10 - and it was not long after the C64 was first released.

Later learnt assembly on the amiga where due to improving skills I actually started writing a game with a friend - he was doing the graphics and me the code.

It was tentatively titled "viking soccer" and was going to be a top view football game in the mould of sensible soccer/kick off but with a few twists.

The field of play would be like the courtyard of a castle and there would be no out-of-bounds - the ball would bounce off the walls.

The players were going to be a mixture of ogres, elves, dwarves etc so each would have appropriate stengths and weaknesses - and a bit of biffo would be tolerated - ie ogres could smash about opponents - but their slowness was there handicap.

Sadly got apathetic and didn't get too far on the project but still have the floppies with all our work around here somewhere ....

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 4:26 am

I was pretty handy with HP3000 BASIC. No terminals, only teletypes... 5 teletypes sharing a 150 baud modem. And if you wanted to save your program you had to make a papertape... yeah those were the days.

(I wonder how many miles of papertape it takes to store a gigabyte of data)

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 8:22 am

My first programming job was on the Commodore Pet 8032 - it was so slow we had to write most of a payroll program in 8088 Assembler - it was like Bletchley Park in there some nights.... Confused

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 12:18 pm

All this scares me. Makes me >-------------------------------------------< this much gladder that the Pentium was invented. Hell I'm glad they invented MCA and EISA.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 16 Jan 2008 Posts: 16

i mucked around on a spectrum 48k for a while though my coding attempts where not exactly amazing.... though I did quite well considering I was about 8 years old at the time Smile

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 1:19 pm

In Junior High, I was taught some Pascal, very basic stuff. Creating a boot disk with a password etc...

In college, well I have a computer science Associates and a MIS Bachelors degree. So learned all sorts of fun stuff then, QBasic, C, Visual Basic, Visual C++, COBAL, RPG (report program generator), SQL, Java. Always enjoyed programming but I don't do it anymore.

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 1:38 pm

Oh push, pop, jne, jeq, my old long-forgotten friends...how I miss you! That said, I'm typing this on a PDA lying in bed and no longer have to talk z80, 6502 or my sparse 8088 and I no longer have to keep mental track of whether location 3E20 was data or an instruction.

But to know my old friends push, pop, jeq, jne and their family are still working hard (far harder than in my day) in the processor of this PDA is kind of reassuring. And I never (hmmm, well sometimes) get narky if computers 'don't work like they should' - I see every startup, every character rendered to screen, every web page surfed from a phone as an absolutely impossibly complex miracle that it ever works at all, I really do.

Anyone else geeky enough to want to go to the Bletchley museum just to stand in the aura of the Colossus? Our technical ancestors there saved so so many lives by shortening that war it makes me teary to imagine.

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 9:31 pm

@ bohigal

No idea I'm afraid. I wasn't exactly the most attentive student in the class. Embarassed

419Eater Admin Joined: 30 Sep 2003 Posts: 7469

manbiteslion wrote:

Anyone else geeky enough to want to go to the Bletchley museum..

I did

I also met Tommy Flowers too (though in a totally separate place - I was dreaming!).

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 11:35 pm

shiver wrote:

I also met Tommy Flowers too.

Such a great name - could you imagine a Hollywood hero saving countless lives etc etc being called Tommy Flowers?

I assume then you've also admired the work on the difference engine at the Science Museum? There ain't half been some clever b*ggers...

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 11:36 pm

I learned to code on an Atari 400 and later an Atari 600xl. Had a few things published in the Atari magazines of the time, but nothing really ground breaking. That was followed by an Atari 512ST where I and a few other miscreants took on the best of the Swedish demo crews and sadly came 2nd (although we did do 2 channel 22khz sound with no border before the Carebears!).

As a commercial programmer my first job was doing PLC's and SCADA systems with 6502 dev boards. And for the oldies amongst you...

Code:

PHP
PHA
TXA
PHA
TYA
PHA
TSX
LDY STACKPTR
STX STACK, Y
INY
CPY #$08
BNE PART2
LDY #$0
LABEL PART2:
LDX STACK, Y
STY STACKPTR
TXS
PLA
TAY
PLA
TAX
PLA
PLP
RTI

Interupt timer driven multitasking on a 6502. Sorry for including the code, but people my age who know the 6502 has a fixed stack page never believe we did it without some funky hardware, there you go, we did and it sucked having 26bytes of stack and not enough processor cycles to check if we ran into another processes stack space!

I finally sold out and ended up doing back office systems for DOS+Windows and later becoming a manager and torturing university graduates who think Java is cool and Haskell is useful Laughing

Adding to my oldskool credentials, I've donated code to an Atari 8bit emulator program, an ST emulator program and I'm currently porting Atari800Plus to XNA just so I can play MULE on the 360.

419Eater Admin Joined: 30 Sep 2003 Posts: 7469

Sadly, I've never set foot in the Science Museum, much to my shame. London seems to get all the good gigs, but I usually only go there under protest Wink

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:13 am

lokie wrote:

... I've donated code to an Atari 8bit emulator program, an ST emulator program ...

Magic_PC?

Honest to God - I shit you not: Just a few months ago I had a customer send me text files he had written with Signum4 using the Magic_PC emulator. In fact, I just got the index file today.

I had to install Magic_PC and Signum4 on my system and export all the text as ascii to DOS/WIN. It was full of italics and mathmatical formulae, which of course all went belly up and had to be re-coded by hand. Evil or Very Mad

I was close to killing someone. I didn't have any documentation for Magic_PC and couldn't get half of it to work.

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