SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
With the recent brouhaha about vulnerabilities in many relatively recent processors, I got to thinking back to the time when I first started programming. Back then, things seemed so much simpler and much more straightforward.
To start off the new year, I thought it might be interesting to find out how people got their start in programming.
My first exposure to programming was by means of a Teletype over a dialup line using an acoustical coupler to a PDP-8 computer running TSS/8 and which had 24 KB of RAM. At the time, Star Trek ToS was on the air, and I thought this was the new, big thing. I was quickly disappointed by it not measuring up to anything like what I saw on TV, but I saw it had promise. Started with BASIC (and FOCAL). Later on was exposed to a PDP-11 running RSTS/E and programmed in BASIC+ as well as some Pascal.
As for owning a computer, the first one I bought was an OSI[*] Challenger 4P with a whopping 4KB of RAM!
From those humble beginnings, I ate up everything I could lay my hands on and later worked for a wide variety of companies that ranged in size from major internationals to tiny startups. Even had a hand in a project for Formula 1!
So, my fellow Soylentils, how did you get started programming? Where has it taken you?
[*] One day when my girlfriend came over and saw the OSI logo on my computer her eyes got huge! You see, The Six Million Dollar Man was on television at that time, and she suddenly suspected I was connected to the "Office of Scientific Intelligence"!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Friday January 05 2018, @11:16AM
Yes. Flip a row of toggle switches up and down. Load address. Flip switches again. Load data. Flip switches again. Load data. ... ad nauseum .. until all loaded.
Go back. Step through again. Make sure you did not misload any. One crash going through usually scrambles everything with a runaway stack.
My first EPROM programmer was a Godsend! ( 1702. Required a +105V programming voltage. 256 bytes each. And thank God they gave me the 8080 programming code preloaded on one of the chips that came on the board. I think it was Godbout electronics, but I can't be sure. )
Once I had that EPROM in place, that made all subsequent construction a helluva lot easier.
First thing was videoram handlers, keyboard handlers, and my first magtape storage.
It took several years before I had 2716 in place and was actually doing assembler. Once I was that advanced, I was getting my magtape filesystem up and running, along with more advanced serial I/O, print head drivers, and dreams of using it for industrial control.
To be honest, by the time I was able to get assembler, I already had a monitor in place and was using a rudimentary keyboard and TV based videoram. The assembler came shortly after I had 2716 storage capability.
I guess the first peripheral I had going on the IMSAI was the videoram driver, keyboard, and tape transport, which at that time had no file structure at all... I was putting all my code at 4000H, and I would read or write the whole 1K block... kinda like a bootstrap program... the code that did that was sitting at a 1702 address 8000H. I had 1K Videorams at E800H and EC00H, with other I/O starting at E000H. The F000H thru FFFFH was the last 4K RAM/ROM slot. I had lots of RAM.. 32K of it. 0000H-8000H. Never did use it all.
What I did not stuff with RAM, I stuffed with 2716, and at the time had it filled with support routines... much like the BIOS calls of DOS ... for reading keyboards, writing to the videorams, reading or writing to tape, and invoking my beloved assembler which was 99% copied from a large brown paperback book ( I believe SAMS published it ). I just had to point their assembler to my keyboard and display routines, and show it where the source file was, and where I wanted it to put the object code, and where some temp space was for it to put the symbol tables.
Those were the days!
It would be many years later before my next big head scratcher... Jeremy Bentham's book on "TCP/IP Lean" and the "TCP/IP illustrated" books came out, and I began horsing around with making my own "micro packets" and little custom protocols. Something I wanted to do, but never got around to it, was to put my IMSAI on the internet....just for the hell of it ... even if all I could do is ping and telnet into it. I would have to cheat and use some later technology to interface it though... like an X-Port or something similar. Well, by the time I do that, I've cheated.... then what's the point. If I am going to cheat, I may as well do an Arduino.
Back then, when the internet was just getting going, we had the +HCU, with +ORC and +Fravia ( I'm giving you the exact spelling, so if you want a little retro fun, Google still finds these guys if you aren't already aware of them. ).
I learned more stuff from those guys.... look for mirrors of "searchlores". There is still a helluva lot of stuff there. But at one time there was a lot more. I was really getting into their steganography stuff.
Now, the whole scene seems to be about what I can buy - but not understand.
I am the guy who loves to take a bunch of scrap and build a car... not shop all day at showrooms for stuff I can't afford.
I do not think there is any way to recreate the environment required for the education those of our generation got. Too encumbered with intellectual property rights and congressionally legislated ignorance. They do not want us knowing how the machines they use to control us work. Just like the priests of old took great offense to the public getting access to the holy books, and making their own judgements of whether the priest was full of shit or not. The priests lost their power when the people knew the truth. Now the priests are re-emerging with different robes... the robes of their self-proclaimed rightsholder status, codified into law by their congressional cohorts.
Where will it end? My guess is that another country will technically advance over us, build all of our stuff, then one day decide they will take our country as payment. We will fight back but our stuff, backdoored by them, ceases to function. They come in and all those property deeds filed by the haves, become heating fuel.
And we all will do whatever they tell us to do.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]