[Year 12 SofDev] For Greybeards only. Others - please step away from your computing machines.

[Mark]

<greybeard>

I remember reverse-engineering the Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 ROM with pen and
paper in 1980.  The BASIC code started at 42E9.

At that time I could speak hexadecimal and Z80 opcodes as well as I could
speak and teach English.
I still - for some reason - remember C3 and CD opcodes for JUMP and CALL.

But - unlike in 'Halt and Catch Fire' - I never dreamed of luxuries such as
floppy disk drives (then about $3000 if you could get them at all in Oz) or
a dot matrix printer ($priceless).

I had a cassette recorder and a pen.

Man. If you learnt to program in those days (I had 4K RAM to work in), you
were ruthlessly economical with RAM optimised code until your ears bled.
Saving years as 2-digits to save 2 bytes was a no-brainer, even if the
millennium bug had been foreseeable.
Your code was impenetrable to anyone else (and even yourself a month later)
but it was OPTIMAL.
And we had separate editors, compilers, linkers, debuggers - and coffee
makers. The revolutionary Borland concept of an IDE was still quite some
years away.

Our kids are too unaware of the logical parts of an IDE. They need to know.

Nowadays, whippersnappers would think nothing of using a 16KB image for a
logo - four times the total RAM I had for my entire program.

But then I think back to learning to use Wordstar... dog! that was an ugly
pig of a program. All the memory they didn't have in their computers was
reassigned to the user's cranium. "You need to memorise about 192 keyboard
shortcuts - OK?" And we said it was OK, and our suffering to learn these
arcane secrets made us warm, proud - and sometimes reluctant to throw off
hard-earned skills in order to learn new whippersnapper technologies like
GUI, OOP and CSS.

For fun, I'd recommend you switch between watching episodes of 'Silicon
Valley' and 'Halt and Catch Fire' to get a taste of IT progress in just 30
years.

It took just 66 years to get from Kitty Hawk to The Sea of Tranquility.

We in IT have only just *begun*...

</greybeard>

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/halt-and-catch-fire/
"Few spaces are as hallowed in tech-startup lore as the humble garage. Bill
Hewlett and Dave Packard launched their company in one in Palo Alto in
1939. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (and, yes, Ronald Wayne) launched Apple
in Jobs’ Los Altos, California, garage in 1976. And let us not forget
another duo, Joe MacMillan and Gordon Clark, who reverse-engineered an IBM
PC in the garage of Clark’s Dallas home during a single weekend in 1983,
setting their company Cardiff Electric on course to develop a portable PC
twice as fast and half as expensive as anything then available.

OK, so maybe that last one is made up.

It’s the plot of Halt and Catch Fire, AMC’s latest prestige drama, set in
Texas’ Silicon Prairie during the personal computer boom of the early ’80s.
And we won’t even know until the end of the 10-episode season (premiering
this Sunday) whether MacMillan (Lee Pace, of the late ABC cult favorite
Pushing Daisies), Clark (Argo and 12 Years a Slave’s Scoot McNairy), and
their colleagues are able to bring their cutting-edge tech to market, or if
their dreams get crushed by industry heavyweight Big Blue. But the point
is, the plot—and the stakes—should feel as real as possible to the viewer.
“Authenticity is huge for us,” says showrunner Jonathan Lisco. “We’re
constantly making sure the verisimilitude of the show is as impervious as
possible.”

-- 

Mark Kelly
mark AT vceit DOT com
http://vceit.com

*The two most important things to remember in order to become powerful are:*
*1. Never tell your competitors everything you know.*
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