[thechat] Binary Code of Computers

[Andrew Forsberg]

On Thu, 2002-05-09 at 01:26, Luther, Ron wrote:

> Rats!  I musta missed that X-files episode!

Hi Ron,

Roger that on the X-Files episode -- the man on TV last week talked over
the concluding music to say that 'next week's episode would be the last
ever'. OMG, what a tragedy. Although, I have to say this Moulder coming
back / Scully (sp?) having child / new people on the X-Files team / etc
etc stuff is getting on my tits.

It sounds like the binary code episode was up there with the
uber-chess-playing-mind-reading-probably-half-alien child episodes.

> 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!

Lol! I remember, between the ages of 8 and 12, taking excerpts from PC
magazine and typing them via echo copy con to files for PC DOS's debug
(yea, not MS DOS ... there really was a PC DOS :) ) and creating
virtually useless, but kinda fun, programs. Yay for push and pop!

That said, it sounds like your magazines skipped the level of
abstraction assembly offers and went straight for machine code. I bow
before your superior primitive geekdom :)

  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!

FWIW, one of the articles I read had a fix for a whacko 8086 cache /
memory problem. Programs would freeze occasionally because the RAM (yup,
all 640K) installed in the machine was faster than the system could
handle. This small assembly language script forced a refresh of the ram
every so often which solved the problem. All the boot disks from then on
had this little program running in config.sys. And, yea, there was a
typo in the code...

Those were the days when geeks (well, 9 year old wannabe geeks) were
geeks. Sigh....

Lol, & thanks for the memories,
Andrew