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OriginalGriff wrote: pour the blood of a virgin sacrifice
Way back in the Before Times, children, I worked in the computer center at our local Air Force base. We were having a Cray supercomputer installed in the front of the 2 acre computer room. It's the only time I've seen an installation have gawkers. I observed to the other folks from my office who were with me that we needed to find a virgin operator to sacrifice on it before starting it up for the first time. The joke of course being the notion of a virgin operator, since it was well known that the operators (especially those on the night crew) humped like weasels in out of the way corners of the computer room at every opportunity.
Software Zen: delete this;
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OriginalGriff wrote: Back in the early days (when I was all embedded, and only had 4K of ROM and 4K of RAM to play with) there were all the tricks: self modifying code, undocumented processor features (that only worked in the pre V3 hardware mask), hand tuned spaghetti assembler, all the kinds of things that I recoil from these days!
And here I thought I had purged memories of debugging code where the original programmer was jumping into the middle of instructions hoping they'd be interpreted as NOPs just to save a byte here and there to make the game fit into a 2K ROM cartridge.
I remember we tried jumping up and down on the chips, but it didn't make the bits fit any better, but we all felt better nonetheless.
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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flip the NEXT switch UP once to advance to the next memory location, enter the instruction using the 8 DATA switches, then flip the WRITE switch once to save it. 
Will Rogers never met me.
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Bet you were glad when they finally invented the wheel so beer trolly didn't spill as much beer.
Jeez...
cheers
Chris Maunder
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If doing that in school counts I've entered code that way (68000 breadboard computer in an electronics class) and I'm 95% sure I'm younger than you are. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I remember flipping switches when the machine we used for communications went down. I would get a call from the field and had to walk to the other side of the building and start the boot switching sequence.
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am.
JimmyRopes
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I remember that about 30 years ago, the links to the UK JANet network (Joint Academic Network) used PDP11s as communications servers which needed half a dozen instructions toggled into the front panel to boot the main program.
I used to be able to do it from memory! BOOM! BOOM! 
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StarNamer_ wrote: I remember that about 30 years ago
It was the early 1970's and it was a PDP8 if my memory serves me correctly.
It used to drop out a lot so I got pretty good at doing it also. 
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am.
JimmyRopes
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I was at Manchester University in the Physics Department from 1978 to 1986 as a Research Associate so it would have been either 1979 or 1980 and it was definitely a PDP-11 that we had.
I also used a PDP-8 (and a PDP-10) in 1974/5/6 as an undergraduate at Oxford.
Also a PDP-7, a PDP-9 and a PDP-15 while at Manchester.
All of them were 'proper' computers with a panel of lights and a row of toggle switches!
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Been there, did that on a DEC PDP-11/05 at school. The machine stored its 80 word bootstrap in a piece of core memory. Student programs routinely wiped the bootstrap due to an errant addressing mode or somesuch. I had to do it once or twice. One guy became legendary for his ability to enter the bootstrap in under 60 seconds. Of course, that doesn't say much for how he acquired the skill...
Software Zen: delete this;
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Happily I only had to do it with one machine, an Altair 8800. Once I built a circuit to connect it to a Teletype ASR 33, I wrote the bootstrap program to load the OS from paper tape. Then I wrote the OS in stages, along with an Assembler. Once those got manually entered, I punched them all to tape and never had to enter anything that way again, except the bootstrap code.
Will Rogers never met me.
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That's a familiar story. My stepdad had a COSMAC ELF single-board computer he built from a kit (he's a EE, so he knows which end of a soldering iron to hold). He added a KSR 33 teletype for I/O, and hand-assembled code to run it. We found a Tiny BASIC interpreter that would run on the board that was about 1.5K, so we spent a weekend fat-fingering it in on the board's hex keypad and debugging the I/O. After we got it working, he hooked up a car battery as a backup so that we wouldn't have to do that again.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary Wheeler wrote: After we got it working, he hooked up a car battery as a backup so that we wouldn't have to do that again.
I wish I'd been smart enough to do that! During the initial development the power often blinked, which required me to start the hand loading process over again. After 4 or 5 restarts in a single evening (it was a night job, after classes, at a different Uni), the charm sorta wore off.
Will Rogers never met me.
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We cheated. The car battery was part of a battery-backup system he'd rigged for the sump pump in our basement. It only took a few mA to keep the thing running, especially since most of the board was CMOS.
Software Zen: delete this;
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You young folks don't know how lucky you are. Why, when I was your age, a byte only had two bits -- and they were both 1s! Do you have any idea how hard it is to do floating-point arithmetic in Roman numerals? Ah, but the men were men in those days...
(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)
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Reminds me of toggling in the bootstrap loader on the PDP-11/20.
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I used to write on coding sheets & send them off to be punched.
Then we got a Holorith(sp?) manual card punch. PROGRESS!
Then we got keyboard-driven card punches. PROGRESS!
Then we got a teletype terminal with thermal paper. PROGRESS!
Then we got a VDU. PROGRESS!
Then we got a text editor. PROGRESS!
Then we got the ability to send a job to compile ourselves. PROGRESS!
Then we got local compilers. PROGRESS!
Then we got an IDE. PROGRESS!
Then we got colour screens. PROGRESS!
Then we got PCs. PROGRESS!
Then we got new OO languages. PROGRESS!
Then we got Visual Studio 2010. F***!
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I experienced everything you mentioned and agree for the most part, but how can you knock Visual Studio ?
We can’t stop here, this is bat country - Hunter S Thompson RIP
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pkfox wrote: how can you knock Visual Studio ?
Experience shows that a big sh*tty stick gives the most satisfaction
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Yeah. And that's why Eclipse is mostly used for Java, the stick isn't that satisfying when you can't hold it from all the dirt.
OT: Didn't knew you are on FarceBook.
I will never again mention that Dalek Dave was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel.
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I prefer Netbeans, for some stupid reason. But then all IDE's have gone down hill since forever.
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I wish Eclipse was only used for Java. Texas Instrument's C/C++ development environment for their DSP's (Code Composer Studio) is Eclipse based. I like embedded and DSP programming but really dislike the Eclipse environment.
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Chris Maunder wrote: What sort of relatively recent stuff (this was 10 years ago) did you used to have to do to get your apps to work?
Let's see. Because the database manager was an idiot, my manager and I had to create a skunk-works project to hide how we were doing things so it didn't take a week per table to write the update, insert, delete, select operations. I kid you not.
Rewrote the "Application Coordinator" that this guy had put together taking up most of a year of his time. I rewrote it in a weekend, to the wrath of said developer and the envy of everyone else that had to use said developer's pile of dung. Needless to say, my team ditched this guy's code immediately, and we went on to be a productive, on time and on budget team.
Along those lines, getting my team's app to work meant finding the right people, smart people, not dogmatic "design pattern" nincompoops that were running around the hallways touting Java and exclaiming "ooh, did you read about the Visitor Pattern?"
On a personal note, getting my C++ apps to work meant realizing that "base class" was the top of the abstraction, not the foundation (and therefore the derived class) in a class hierarchy. I had to remove the "base of the pyramid" image from my understanding of OO.
And lastly, solid architecture. And what that meant was, architecture that logged every keystroke, every mouse click, every button press, so I could tell the mostly good, honest, but sloppy people in the QA department, no, you didn't click on "Save", you clicked on "Cancel" to refute their claim that the app failed to save their document.
Marc
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I still do that for early releases
We can’t stop here, this is bat country - Hunter S Thompson RIP
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Marc Clifton wrote: And lastly, solid architecture. And what that meant was, architecture that logged every keystroke, every mouse click, every button press, so I could tell the mostly good, honest, but sloppy people in the QA department, no, you didn't click on "Save", you clicked on "Cancel" to refute their claim that the app failed to save their document.
Ooh, good idea. I was figuring on using the C# version of UnhandledExceptionFilterHandler for ultimate deniability error-catching, and that's a good addition as well.
Now I just need to work around C#'s "if anything but the main thread has an unhandled exception, terminate the thread and ignore it" methodology...
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