OMG. Can you imagine publishing Machine Code for Beginners today??

[saper@mastodon.social]

@paco need the same badly for #nvidia

[paco@infosec.exchange]

@bitchboss In THIS place? Everyone wants to hear about it!

[bertdriehuis@infosec.exchange]

@paco when I got my Commodore PET 2001, the previous owner threw in a handwritten disassembly of the entire BASIC ROM. I learned a lot from that, and it kindled my interest in languages.

Unfortunately the 6502 is one of those modern integrated devices, so no peeking under the hood there. But when the PDP8 at school came with full schematics, and the whole thing turned out to be constructed using TTL chips I already knew, that too was weeks of exploration, fun and learning.

[ianturton@mapstodon.space]

@glasspusher @paco I was just thinking that too, not sure if I had this book or another one like it for the zx81 and later the spectrum

[walrus@toot.wales]

@bitchboss @paco

I was living in a Z80 at the time...

[fritzadalis@infosec.exchange]

@Walrus @bitchboss @paco
Shoot, got people living in a Z80 today.

[bitchboss@marcella.masto.host]

@Walrus @paco

That was my father's adventure, the Sinclair ZX80. He still has it. He played with it a lot. He taught me how to program. When I was 18, I switched to an Atari 800XL, which I used as my breaker box in the Air Force. The first thing I programmed was a modification to the tape OS using machine code (with a self-written assembler) to increase the baud rate and record/read file name headers on cassette tapes. I mean, 500 baud and not knowing what track is on the tape is bananas...

[paco@infosec.exchange]

@bitchboss Awesome!
@Walrus

[bitchboss@marcella.masto.host]

@FritzAdalis @Walrus @paco

Symplicity goes a long way...

[simonzerafa@infosec.exchange]

@paco

There are still one or two brave souls that program in Assembler

[impossibleumbrella@infosec.exchange]

@gimulnautti @paco It is fun.

[robinadams@mathstodon.xyz]

@GreenYesScotland @paco This is how I learned Fortran.

A FORTRAN Coloring Book : Kaufman, Roger. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

A FORTRAN Coloring Book

Internet Archive (archive.org)

[paco@infosec.exchange]

@simonzerafa My first, and perhaps most interesting, contribution to open source was assembly.

To play DOOM head to head over a modem, you needed a TSR that ran in DOS and basically translated a modem connection onto a network connection. My uni had these super fast digital modems (115K when the standard was 56K). The DOOM folks open-sourced this little serial adapter thingie. I rewrote some of the main loop in assembly to improve efficiency and emailed the patch.

Frankly, I was a 4th year student who had just taken his first assembly class. It’s entirely likely that I didn’t improve it much at all.

[bcasiello@floss.social]

@paco Yes, but every page would start out “Ask your AI Assistant to…”

[gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@gimulnautti

some of us did…
(and for small, simple architectures, I still find it kinda fun, but amd64 and ARM have gotten too big for me to find them fun/interesting)

@paco

[johnlogic@sfba.social]

@paco

On the first computer I used with any regularity, I entered machine code via a hex keypad into its RAM--all 256 bytes of it.

That was an RCA COSMAC ELF single-board computer.

I was around 10 years old.

Assemblers and assembly language are luxury in comparison.

[paco@infosec.exchange]

@johnlogic you got me beat. My first was a commodore VIC20. 20 Kb of memory. Of which 3600 or so was RAM.

[carstenfranke@mastodon.social]

@bitchboss @paco
I built the "Junior Computer" with my dad, Germany, early 80s, this was 6502 based... I still have the books...

[bitchboss@marcella.masto.host]

@carstenfranke @paco

Wonderful. A hexcoder. That was programming that really impressed people. Nowadays, you can program 6502 PCB boards with C (online) and download the binary to a PCB board with a 6502 no bigger than a pinhead.

The beauty of this is that if the world collapses, these types of computers are easy to put together with parts from... the scrapyard. You just have to dig a little deeper...

[johnlogic@sfba.social]

@paco I don't know the VIC-20 that well. I moved up to an Atari 800 when they were sold fully loaded with 48 kiB of RAM. It also included 10 kiB of OS ROM, where 2 k was just the character set bitmaps.