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

[luc0x61@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@paco I learnt Z80 assembly code first from instructions seen in listings, and then in Rodnay Zaks "Programming the Z80" book.
By that time we were learning more about thelow level basics, developing was more complex sometimes.
The level of abstraction of today gives a lot of flexibility, but at the same time astrays from the waste of resources: memory space, computing power, energy waste, even for terribly simple applications.

[martinrust@infosec.exchange]

@msh @paco "every kid" is a bit exaggerated, isn't it? But I agree to your point.

[gevoel@mastodon.green]

@paco
Nice. The closest to the machine programming I ever did was in assembler. Only a very little bit. Around 1987

[walrus@toot.wales]

@paco

RPOM (previously called Magpi) had a series on it, less than a year ago... They'll turn it into a book soon...

[christoff@yem.bouncingaroundtheroom.online]

@paco @mainframed767 we need more of this

[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