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

[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.

[zosho@toot.wales]

@bitchboss @paco Time well spent! This little homebrew board and a BBC micro to write code for it saved a very remotely-located experiment I was responsible for when its controller failed. Only made feasible by Sophie Wilson’s foresight to build a very capable 6502 assembler into the BBC’s Basic environment.

[bitchboss@marcella.masto.host]

@zosho @paco

Oh wow! The last time I saw wiring like that was when Gould was building spy satellites. And yes, an inline assembler to be envious of. I believe Turbo Basic 8088 and its successors also have an inline assembler. Very special.

[zosho@toot.wales]

@bitchboss @paco wouldn’t recommended it unless it’s the only way available!