Completely OT

[gaz_l]

And apropos of nothing at all..

Many, many years ago (1978 to be precise) I saw a TV programme which fascinated me. Courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation, it concerned the new-fangled "silicon chips". It sparked an interest in computing which stays with me to this day.

The programme was Horizon and the episode was called "Now the chips are down". I was delighted to find it on YouTube recently - if you have any interest in the subject and a spare 45 minutes it's well worth a watch, IMHO:

[YOUTUBE]ll_-_ngu4Gg[/YOUTUBE]

Incredible how things have moved on in the mean time. It wasn't lost to me that I watched this by streaming it wirelessly from my iPad to the Apple TV connected to the flat screen telly in the bedroom - all things that were in the realms of science fiction when the program was first broadcast.

I saw my 9 year old god-daughter today, and she'd got a Samsung tablet for Christmas. She was happily swiping away at it, kids today are born to use technology that was unthinkable a generation ago.

Don't know what the point of this is , just rambling a bit. But do watch the programme if you have the time - I still find it fascinating.

Cheers,

Gaz

 

[Colin_b]

Interesting programme. The interesting aspects are how much hardware has improved, and how little software has, and how slow business has been to adapt to it.


I heard on the radio today that Lloyds bank have central modules in their core banking systems that still operate in pre decimal currency! A very small part of the reason the Co-Op merger failed.

 

[Dryce]

Interesting programme. The interesting aspects are how much hardware has improved, and how little software has, and how slow business has been to adapt to it.

Most of us reading this will be doing so on a PC or Apple based on an x86 processor which derives from the 8086 of the late seventies with the x86 processor's instruction set being an interim that was based on the even older 8080 as a stopgap.

Now the internals of the modern CPU are a lot cleverer (those extra gates and speed get used for something).

The underlying computing concepts and programming systems are basically tied to 70s and 80s.

I feel quite lucky that my IT career was grounded in the 70s as I got to play with a greater diversity of programming languages and processor architectures than those who have started since the 90s.

 

[ItalianTuneUp]

LDX #$FF
LOOP TXA
STA $8000, X
DEX
BNE LOOP
RTS

6502 assembly language. Those were the days...

I still have a working 6502 assembler, which I wrote in 'C'...and there are 6502 emulators around. Fun to reminisce sometimes

 

[ItalianTuneUp]

Interesting programme. The interesting aspects are how much hardware has improved, and how little software has, and how slow business has been to adapt to it.

I heard on the radio today that Lloyds bank have central modules in their core banking systems that still operate in pre decimal currency! A very small part of the reason the Co-Op merger failed.

And a lot of banking/insurance software is still written in COBOL allegedly.

 

[LTD]

And a lot of banking/insurance software is still written in COBOL allegedly.

More like BOLOCs

 

[ItalianTuneUp]

Lol, yes indeed

 

[BTB 500]

Funnily enough in 1978 I was a COBOL programmer

Lots of it still around. Not sure I believe the story about Lloyds and pre-decimal currency code though.

 

[Ted]

Right, well we 'ad it tough.

I have programmed in binary.
Seriously
No monitor running - create the commands and enter them into memory via the front panel switches.
Only about 10 (decimal) instructions - it was a bootstrap to boot from a non standard device in fixed i/o space.

 

[markjay]

LDX #$FF
LOOP TXA
STA $8000, X
DEX
BNE LOOP
RTS

6502 assembly language. Those were the days...

I still have a working 6502 assembler, which I wrote in 'C'...and there are 6502 emulators around. Fun to reminisce sometimes

My Apple II was based on this Motorola chip....

 

[Paul/]

6502 assembly language. Those were the days...

I still have a working 6502 assembler, which I wrote in 'C'...and there are 6502 emulators around. Fun to reminisce sometimes

I wrote my first commercial C64 game directly in 6502 machine code- I didn't have an assembler then! As a result, I learnt the byte values for most of the instruction set. And every time I added new instructions in a section of code, I had to recalculate all the jumps and loops

I don't have any working C64s anymore and keep on meaning to try an emulator to see if any of the downloads I can find for my games will actually run properly.

 

[ItalianTuneUp]

My Apple II was based on this Motorola chip....

Yes, it was, I remember it. ][

I had a Commodore PET, VIC20, C64, Atari 800 and 1541 disk drive, all based on this simple, but fairly easy to program processor. Such a short & simple instruction set.

 

[ItalianTuneUp]

I wrote my first commercial C64 game directly in 6502 machine code- I didn't have an assembler then! As a result, I learnt the byte values for most of the instruction set. And every time I added new instructions in a section of code, I had to recalculate all the jumps and loops

I don't have any working C64s anymore and keep on meaning to try an emulator to see if any of the downloads I can find for my games will actually run properly.

Wow, that's impressive! I remember how these machines used to crash, often needing a reboot after one simple opcode/branch offset miscalculation. That's why I had my PET with the case open and a reset button hanging out of it...

Which games did you write?

 

[ItalianTuneUp]

A good emulator for the Commodore 64 is called VICE.

 

[Paul/]

Wow, that's impressive! I remember how these machines used to crash, often needing a reboot after one simple opcode/branch offset miscalculation. That's why I had my PET with the case open and a reset button hanging out of it...

Which games did you write?

Probably more bonkers than impressive! And yes indeed, it certainly improves your coding discipline when you've only got one machine and a tape deck to code and run on- as you say, get it wrong on a loop point and you would watch helplessly as the code ran wildly through the graphics.

"Alien" is probably the least obscure of them.

 

[Colin_b]

Funnily enough in 1978 I was a COBOL programmer

Lots of it still around. Not sure I believe the story about Lloyds and pre-decimal currency code though.

Its true, allegedly. The detail became apparent in parliamentary scrutiny of the Lloyds/Co-Op shambles.

About 20 minutes into this programme...

BBC Radio 4 - The Report, Banking IT crisis

 

[markjay]

My first ever 'computer game' (or rather, 'interactive game') was ping pong on a TV - circa 1978.

Second was Space Invaders on an Atari console at a club in 1980.

Third was 'Lost Duchman's Gold' - a text adventure game that came with a computer magazine in printed form and which I manually typed-in into the Apple II ROM Basic over many nights and then saved to an audio cassette tape recorder (this was before disk drives were available for the Apple). The year was 1982.

 

[Somebody]

That is so cool, thanks for posting it. Really interesting to see the world from that perspective. How things have changed.

British people still sound hella weird tho.

Looooool. Happy new year UK people!!!!

(yes, that was a joke)

 

[Dryce]

My Apple II was based on this Motorola chip....

The 6502 wasn't Motorola but MOS Tech.

It was related to the 6800 though because some of the designers were ex-Motorola. Bit like the Z80 being related to the 8080.

I remember the 6502 with some affection as I did a lot of 6502 assembly language in the late 70s and into the early 80s - after first working with the 8080 and Nat Semi SC/MP.

 

[markjay]

The 6502 wasn't Motorola but MOS Tech.

It was related to the 6800 though because some of the designers were ex-Motorola. Bit like the Z80 being related to the 8080.

I remember the 6502 with some affection as I did a lot of 6502 assembly language in the late 70s and into the early 80s - after first working with the 8080 and Nat Semi SC/MP.

Yes, the 6502 was based on an earlier Motorola chip but was made by MOS, though I think that the 65C02 found in the Apple //c was again made by Motorolla.

The other players in the micro field at the time were CP/M machins based on (I think) the 8080.

And then came IBM....