On 10/10/2011 12:58 AM, Rocky wrote:
"John wrote in message
...
On 10/8/2011 11:19 PM, Rocky wrote:
"John wrote in message
...
On 10/5/2011 8:10 PM, J R wrote:
I just now heard on TV news he has died.
cuhulin
I guess you just can't keep charging people too much for hardware and OS
forever ... someone elses' turn now ...
Regards,
JS
FYI I owe my life to an old Apple ][+ because I learned machine language
programming on one of those and then through a series of events ended up
being a full time programmer for IBM personal computers that got to
travel
all over the place like from Boston, MA to Orlando, FL via New York City
were I went to the top of the South Tower. And I went to places like San
Francisco, Los Angeles, Catalina Island, Amarillo, TX even up to
Vancouver
Canada and a lot of other places in the mid states.
Two of the things I did on the Apple ][e computers while I was still in
school were to rewrite the OS so it could load the first two programs on
a
disk without loading the entire OS depending on what number I pressed
while
booting and I changed my OS so I no longer had to spell out the entire
word
CATALOG. All I had to do was spell cat or catwhatever (meaning as long
at
the word "cat" was spelled in upper or lower case it didn't matter what
letters were behind it).
Yep, I owe my life to Steve Jobs even though I never bought an iPhone,
iPad
or iPod but I might buy an iPhone if Sprint will let me keep my current
plan
with unlimited phone as modem.
Rocky
Wow, learned motorola syntax to write in intel assembly syntax ... kinda
like exchanging the horses place with the cart ...
Yes they were different but the closest thing to Intel machine language was
machine language. Besides the assembler I had at the time could be used for
multiple languages and we had to learn a few of them too.
In the early days, getting documentation on the apple bios was so
difficult, it was probably the major reason most jumped to intel to write
OS, apps, etc.
I had just the opposite problem. I found it was easier to get documentation
the Apple Dos and Apple BIOS than it was for me to get it for the IBM AT.
And when I finally found and bought my IBM AT Technical Reference Manual I
ended up with a used copy instead of a brand new one.
And, so long ago I forget the specifics, but at least a lot of the apple
bios was boot blocks on a disk, as opposed to the firmware bios of the PC
...
Yep, I remember the way Apple booted very well and I never figured out how
to boot trace on an IBM the way I could with the Apple.
As a matter of fact that fast loader I wrote for the Apple DOS that could
run programs without loading the entire OS was placed into the sector that
was used to assemble the data read from the disk.
That reminds me. I also sped up how quick I could read from text files from
a disk because on a read I removed the built in time-out and just read from
the disk until I didn't get an error.
I even wrote a special OS just to handle Rayna drives that supported 80
tracks and then used that on my BBS. Oh boy, talking about my Apple BBS
now. I even rewrote the machine language part of the modem interface to be
interrupt driven and after I did that the user could no longer tell when it
was changing modules because it would change modules while it was still
sending characters out of a buffer via interrupts.
Regards,
JS
Rocky
Since my first language was actually hex and firmware programming,
assembly actually looked "high level" to me ... but, although I
resisted, my life is pledged to the C++ god and his scriptures created
in C syntax ... if you are ever tempted or forced to use assembly, for
some weird and new hardware, you can always use the inline function in
most C compilers and just drop to assembly and keep on writing ... but,
my C compiler will compile straight assembly, if directed to do so ...
the world has gotten gray ... and me too!
Regards,
JS