John Rye wrote:
>
> Paul wrote:
> >
> > It was Sep 30, 2000, 16:48, when Austin L. Denyer keyboarded:
> >
> > >I remember having many hours of fun with the Z80 as well (actually an
> > >8080A). I had a version of the old arcade game 'Space Invaders' that ran in
> > >under one kilobyte of RAM! Eat yer heart out, Mr. Gates...
> >
> > Ha! I know tricks like that one too! I had a machine like that, and wrote
> > a simple but functioning accounting system in it :)
> >
> > >Oh, the delights of having to load every calculation into the accumulator
> > >for every operation. The fun of having to initialize the data direction of
> > >a port before you could use it. The pain of placing redundant instructions
> > >inside nested loops to achieve time delays, calculated manually by the
> > >instruction time for each operation.
> >
> > Hahahaha!! Memories are coming back indeed... And even where you needed
> > more speed than the machine could actually deliver, you'd have to fool the
> > processor, or invent strange code to steal a cycle here or there...
> >
> > >The programmers of today don't know they're born...
> > >
> > >One of the beauties of Linux is that it allows you to get back to tight
> > >code, and real optimizations, rather than the slow bloatware of other
> > >systems.
> >
> > I agree. People that learn to program these days, on visual such and so,
> > can't understand that you can write a complete program in less than
> > 500Kbytes.
> >
>
> For an example of tight (and I mean TRICKY TIGHT! ) aquire and reverse
> engineer the original Microsoft BASIC. What had been around 48K on the
> PDP-11 was packed into a 4k ROM.
>
> A trully brilliant bit of optimising of existing code segments.
>
> Can't for the life of me remember who the work was attributed too -
> but I rather think he'd be a rather rich dude these days.
>
Remembered the authors' name...
Gates, William !!!
--
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"The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected"
(The UNIX Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June 1972.)
