Ah the days of pure machine code

There was something to be said about direct communication with he cpu. I remember the days of looking up the command execution time to manually optimize the code for speed. And when keyboards and monitors were developed, writing the code to display ASCII characters on the CRT.

 

Yup - that's a far cry from the RAD methods used today.

 

Not to mention that a single "Hello World" app in today's environment is probably a thousand times bigger.

 

Writing programs to run in 4 "K" of RAM was fun.

 

 

Vic

 

 

programing in Fortran 4

Oh, what memories you evoke !

edit

11 inch disk pack with multiple platters. I worked with one that ran 11 disks in a single pack.

 

Primary programming interface was a optical mylar tape reader. Secondary interface was the primary door (this thing was huge) with a bunch of lights representing the bits in the registers and buttons beneath each one.

 

Ah the days of pure machine code.

Well I can remember working in a company that ran its computer to do overnight processing. And it had a core store!! The computer geeks used it as a table tennis net!

There was something to be said about direct communication with he cpu. I remember the days of looking up the command execution time to manually optimize the code for speed. And when keyboards and monitors were developed, writing the code to display ASCII characters on the CRT.

 

Yup - that's a far cry from the RAD methods used today.

 

Not to mention that a single "Hello World" app in today's environment is probably a thousand times bigger.

 

Writing programs to run in 4 "K" of RAM was fun.

 

 

Vic

Well, my first flight sim was on a BBC micro with 28k memory!!

Mine was a TRS-80, 16k that needed a large interface fox to give 48k. Rows of IC's. It also had no decenders with the letters, so a 'k', 'b', 'y' would be the same size as a 'c' for example. We had to do a hardware mod to get decenders.

We had a choice between a green, amber or a white low res monitor.

 

No anti-aliasing, of course.

Sorry for the necomancy...but

 

Makes you wonder how the Apollo Guidance Computer ever did what it did.

 

I once saw that computer IRL at the Space Museum in Huntsville, AL (home of the Redstone arsenal which is the birthplace of the US space program), and at that time they solved their realtime guidance system equations with the use of hybrid computing, which melds together both analog and digital computing.  That was bleeding edge stuff in its day, and we can thank the space program for significantly advancing IC and digital computer development.  I worked with a hybrid computer in the first few years of my career; it was the only way to get the needed compute bandwidth needed for the realtime hardware in the loop simulation of the guidance systems we were testing.  No such systems are needed with todays CPUs.  Heck, we just retired a computer which had FFTs encoded into firmware ICs that cost $$$$$ and replaced it with standard off the shelf CPUs at a fraction of the cost.

 

Talk about a redirect of an OP....

 

 

Jon_aus, on 21 May 2016 - 10:43 PM, said:

Makes you wonder how the Apollo Guidance Computer ever did what it did.

It worked because it was not written by MS!!!!