Kevin sez:
<snip>
However, I started with wire wrapped boards and assembly language quite a
long time ago.
</snip>
That must have been nice!
I was a Motorcycle mechanic in 1976, and the local Radio Shack dealer had a
Trash-80 in the window (Wow! 4K of RAM).
Anyhow, his boat sunk (in Salt Water) but he found it the next day. Dragged
it home, changed the oil, turned the motor (Volvo Marine In-Out drive) over
4 or so times by hand, and then parked it for a year. He said, if you make
my boat motor go, I'll give you that pretty machine in the window.
Both carburators were just piles of white powder, and it took the "Big" [1]
hammer to get the pistons out. But the RS dealer paid for all parts and
machining and I made his boat go.
Months later, I'd find myself up at 4 in the morning pounding out code on
that little box. I though to myself, "there's folks who'll pay you money for
this", quit my job, went back to North Avenue Trade School [2], and I've
been in computers ever since.
But, that's a different story. Back on thread ...
The Trash-80 came with a list of the Zilog pneumonics for the 8080 machine
code (like 600 instructions, if memory serves - which it usually doesn't)
but no mention of anything like an "Assembler". Anyhow, the Edit/Debug that
came with the machine allowed one to punch in machine code and run it. I was
thrilled. The most intense program I got going "BEFORE" [3] was an
implementation of John Conway's "Life" algorithm. A lot of tedious work, but
very rewarding.
Eventually, somewhere I heard about a thing called an assembler. What a
wonderful concept! You could use WORDS instead of the hex-codes of the
instructions, branch to a LABEL instead of counting up the bytes between
jump-points (very annoying as the instructions came in several different
lenghts) etc. All for $19.95 (1977 dollars). I thought it just couldn't get
any better (actually, it can. Languages like Pascal, LISP, heck, even
S360/370/390 assembler blew this away, but what did I know?).
Ahhh. Children (of course, some folks don't think 27 is a children, but
since 51 still is, I'll sticking to my story).
Dan / WG4S / K2 #2456
[1] 16 pound sledge
[2] Georgia Institute of Technology
[3] BEFORE refers to before my "Discovery of the Assembler"
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