🚀 go-pugleaf

On 17/02/2018 14:59, Peter Flass wrote:
> Gareth's Downstairs Computer
> <headstone255.but.n...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On 16/02/2018 23:04, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>> On 2018-02-16, Gareth's Downstairs Computer
>>> <headstone255.but.n...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 16/02/2018 16:36, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 2018-02-16, Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On 2018-02-15, Peter Flass <peter...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> [22 lines snipped]
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The nostalgia is for the sights, sounds, and smells those days. I can still
>>>>>>> recall leaning over the 1132 printer waiting for my printout to start.
>>>>>>> We're also nostalgic for out first acquaintance with the wonders of
>>>>>>> computers. Now every kid over 8 knows more than we did 50 years ago.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I consider that unlikely.
>>>>>
>>>>> Agreed.  I can't accept that the creators of the Internet don't know
>>>>> as much as the script kiddie who abuses it.
>>>>>
>>>>> Too many doting parents think their kid is a computer genius
>>>>> simply because he knows how to click a mouse.
>>>>
>>>> I once contrated in a company where the meme that kids were
>>>> ace on computers was held. The son of one of the directors had
>>>> produced their first computerised product, all in machine code,
>>>> and all typed in manually into a "Softy" PROM programmer.
>>>
>>> Well, don't keep us in suspense.  Did it work?  Did it work well?
>>>
>>
>> Yes, it did work and sold well. Upgrading though was such a pain that
>> they recoded in assembler *WITHOUT ANY COMMENTS* because, based on their
>> experience with hexadecimal machine code, assembler was "self documenting"!
> 
> I think most of us started out writing impenetrable, commentless code. When
> you're doing a student project it's A) small, B) completed quickly enough
> that you usually don't forget how it's working C) keypunched/typed by you
> D) run once and thrown away.  In my experience that's the biggest step from
> student programming assignments to production work-the code may be complex
> and had to be understood by lots of people, perhaps years later.
> 
>>
>> I was contracted to work on a range of PID controllers for fermentation
>> vessels (Temperature, pH, Dissolved Oxygen, etc) and when I said that
>> they should let it be done in C because of all the maths involved they
>> declined, so I spent much time developing 32 bit arithmetic in 8 bit
>> assembler, which took longer to do (and was thus more expensive) than
>> had C been permitted.
> 
> So use assembler, but call routines from the C library ;-)
> 

A refusal to buy the C compiler resulted in the lack of the C library.

It was ISTR a Hitachi 6303