Holy hanna Ozz! come on man! talk more assembler to me! maybe I'm sick,
but I really like that language.
--
Mark
~~~
...someone once asked Annie Sullivan what she saw in a man she was
considering as perspective suiter who had a terrible case of acne.
Annie was reported to have replied, "His face is an easy read!"
On Sun, 1 Oct 2000 3:25pm ,Austin L. Denyer spake passionately in a message:
>
>
> > Ha! I know tricks like that one too! I had a machine like that, and wrote
> > a simple but functioning accounting system in it :)
>
> One of my colleagues once tried to write a program to calculate the
> performance characteristics of large-bore oil hoses, and ran out of memory
> on a 16k machine. I then wrote the thing myself in ... wait for it ... 450
> BYTES!!!!! Needless to say, it was completely devoid of any eye candy, but
> it worked (well, I wrote it in an evening...)
>
> Out of interest, what machines were you using? How long ago?
>
> > 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...
>
> Oh yes. Some of the memory saving tricks were neat too. I used to use
> existing constants to save precious register space (pi/pi for 1, pi-pi for
> 0, etc.). Another advantage to programming at that level was this:
>
> You knew the value of each op. code.
>
> You knew the location in which you stored it in memory.
>
> Therefore, you could use these codes for constants too.
>
> For example, if the instruction LDA (LoaD Accumulator) was 0fh (15 decimal)
> and you had stored that instruction in memory location 02ff, then you could
> call the value 15 by pointing to 02ff.
>
> Self-modifying code was fun too, especially when someone else tried to parse
> it #;-D
>
> > 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.
>
> I can't wait to get back into it with Linux.
>
> One of these days....
>
> Regards,
> Ozz.
>
>
>
>
>
