In The Dim and Distant Past...
A little history...Way back in like, um, 1983, we got a VIC-20 computer. That little sucker fascinated the hell out of me. I spent many nights learning the ins and outs and pokes and peeks of that little system. Ever curious, I'd see what happened when I'd POKE (set) a value into every memory location, one after another. Most times it would do really really weird shit. Screen flashing, screwy characters, hang the system, reboot! But I learned my way around it and discovered that I had a knack for programming. Often I'd have to fix the programs that were printed in COMPUTE! magazines. They'd have some error or typo and I'd spend FOREVER typing them in just to find that they didn't run. They weren't very powerful, but they were hella fun. 4.5K of memory, tape deck to save programs, hooked up to the TV with an RF Modulator. In order to do anything really cool, you'd have to learn the guts of the thing. I learned a little assembler, but mostly, it was poking and peeking and trial and error. lots of error.
I often think that the young programmers today have missed something by not having to really learn all that blood and guts programming stuff. Ask them about bit masking and shifting, or how memory is organized, or any of the real low level stuff and they just don't know. Don't get me wrong, hell, I love drag and drop and double click and it all is in a pretty WYSIWYG form. But, there is something to be said for understanding how that stuff works under the hood.
posted by Tony @ 3:20 PM
2 Comments:
Especially when the drag-n-drop doesn't work... ;)
4.5 K of memory? Makes my first computer, the Amiga 500 (7mhz, 512K of memory) positively a supercomputer!
V
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