On Sunday 03 June 2007 06:43, James Knott wrote:
> Anyone here remember doing assembly code in DEBUG?
Back in the mid '80s we used "debug.com" at the Tampa lab to
efficiently send
printer control codes to the new line of Proprinters by IBM. The same thing
could be done with some trouble with Rom BASIC... but the simplicity of
calling the bios from a com file for configuring a printer control stream
couldn't be beat...
A buddy and I were all ready to right a "new" debug clone for linux (32
bit).
But after getting used to yasm, and gdb, we decided to forgo the effort. For
those of you who never used it, debug was a combination of debugging tool
(register display) and machine language monitor. It was the latter that most
folks were unaware of usually... early .com files could be written quickly
that would run hundreds of times faster than interpretted counter parts...
and back then all we really has was BASIC, and some rather early level
expensive Pascal from Borland and others.
Assembler is having a bit of a revival these days because of the full
32 bit
flat memory model provided by linux (no worry about segmentation or near/far
calls etc) and the fact that the C library can be used with it almost
transparently. And for some of us--- messing around with the guts of the
processor is just plain fun...
--
Kind regards,
M Harris <><
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