[Gllug] Hypothetical GPL question

[Stig Brautaset]

* Mike Brodbelt <mike at coruscant.demon.co.uk> spake thus:
> Machine code, OTOH is a different kettle of fish. You would have to
> compute all the jumps by hand, and every time you added an instruction
> to your program, the whole lot would be thrown again. I've written
> things in machine code in the past, by using debug under DOS to enter
> hex directly (mostly as an exercise to demonstrate to people that binary
> was not magic!). For a 20 byte program, OK - for 200 Kbyte, no. Before I
> could afford a copy of MASM, I used to write small asm progs into text
> files, and use debug to assemble them. Better than writing raw hex by
> far, but debug couldn't deal with comments in the files, or sensible use
> of whitespace, and I had to recompute the jumps manually - I'd make
> everything jump a fixed amount, assemble, then look at the generated
> code to work out the proper jump sizes, change the source, then
> re-assemble. Being DOS, if you made a typo, the machine crashed, and you
> had to reboot.... 

I had a class in assembly language where we used a single-board computer
with a small amount of RAM and a few LED's for output. IIRC, its model
name was "EMMA II". For input it had a hex-keyboard and a 4 digit
7-segment display to view what you had already written. There was no
non-volatile memory available to store our program, or not that I can
remember at least. I was young and vulnerable at the time, so I might
have supressed this information :P

Basically you typed it in your program -- carefully hand-assembled on
paper --  and crossed your fingers. If the program crashed, you had to
reset the damn thing and start all over again. If it _didn't_ crash
(this happened rarely) you could run the program as many times you
wanted, AFAIR, or until the crocodile-pegs (a bit of a stunt-translation
there) through which the "power" :) where supplied slipped and the thing
power-cycled.

This was the first time I did any "programming" as such, the things I
had done earlier where mere copying off from a tutorial-book in
Commodore 64 BASIC... Oh, the horror. 

Ah, well. All in all a nice stroll down memory lane :)

Regards,
Stig

-- 
brautaset.org
Registered Linux User 107343

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