[thechat] Binary Code of Computers

[Luther, Ron]

No problem Syed!

Rats!  I musta missed that X-files episode!

Your question just happened to trigger some 'flash backs' for me back to the early days of working with 8-bit machines at home.    ;-)

In those days many of us were typing in programs from print magazine articles... and a lot of those programs included subroutines written in 'tokenized' machine language ... which meant trying to correctly type in a string of say 200 characters at the higher [non-standard] end of the ASCII scale ... e.g type an inverse smiley face next to a black square next an inverse video filled in circle next to ... let's just say it was a pain!  Not to mention how often these (oh so well edited) articles had TYPOs in the code that you had to try to debug without much of a clue as to what the code was trying to do .... Yuck City!

However, one of the things I have REALLY missed from those days was having access to 'dumb' editors.  (Okay - I kind of miss the 'memory maps' too!)  'Dumb' editors would let you view [and change!] things like sector header marks ... which let you do things like create your own copy-protected materials.

On one hand it was kinda fun ... remapping character sets ... worrying about vertical blank interrupt timings ... on the other hand it was awfully time consuming trying to figure those things out.

RonL.
(Hey! I was 'state of the art' once ... okay, maybe it was so long ago that the 'art' involved scribbling on cave walls ... but that still counts, right?)

-----Original Message-----
From: Syed Zeeshan Haider [mailto:szh at hotpop.com]

Thank you for such a detailed reply.
You are going in that depth which is unfathomable for me. The idea of searching for 0's and 1's came in my mind when I watched an episode of "The X Files" (a TV show) with Urdu (my language) dubbing. In that episode, a child was used to write
0's and 1's arbitrarily. But on translating them into computer files,
they gave some important data.