> > Youngsters have no idea what programming life was like in the "horse and > buggy" days 40 or 50 years ago: > > - Feeble hardware. > - Feeble programming tools: We worked in assembler or C. > No git, python, numpy, matplotlib and leo. > - No internet! No google, github and online communities! > QQQ > > 40 or 50 years ago the challenges were way different, but we had the same > kind of engineering fun seeing what was possible. >
In 1980 I was briefly involved in a project aimed at writing software to help in learning or reviewing trigonometry. The software was to run on the Atari 800 microcomputer, which offered sophisticated graphics for video displays, supporting mixing of text and graphics and offering hardware support for overlay of sprites along with hardware for detection of collisions between sprites and the rest of the displayed field. All that relied on custom chips built to run alongside the computer's 6502 microprocessor; controlling it required careful programming. The machine featured a maximum of 48 KB of RAM and a floppy disk drive. The project's software was written in Forth, which provided a programming language, use of assembly language when needed, and a development environment that could fit on so small a machine. Forth had for many years an important niche in industrial control and embedded computing. Links of interest: Forth (programming language) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)#Implementations>, on Wikipedia. Gforth, GNU Project's implementation <https://www.gnu.org/software/gforth/> Win32Forth <https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32forth/> Documentation and books Gforth user manual <https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/Docs-html/> Starting Forth <https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/>, by Leo Brodie, updated in 2003 by FORTH, Inc. Thinking Forth: A Language and Philosophy for Solving Problems <https://www.dnd.utwente.nl/~tim/colorforth/Leo-Brodie/thinking-forth.pdf>, by Leo Brodie -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to leo-editor+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/499730d0-403f-440b-94f5-3144177f80d7n%40googlegroups.com.
