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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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SortaCore wrote: if anything but the main thread has an unhandled exception, terminate the thread and ignore it" methodology...
Well, you could put try-catch's in your threads! And there is Application.ThreadException[^] as well.
Marc
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POKE 53280,0
POKE 53281,0
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Not use local stack space for anything bigger than a pointer or integer
(16-bit Windows)
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I have created a really complex and dynamic organizational chart using pure HTML Tables like a Boss! 
A giant table with crazy amount of pre-calculated rowspan and colspan, with even crazy amount of coding in picking the cell border colors (black or white). so that that whole madness will look like this[^] with really tiny scroll bars.
It was in Classic ASP, and the only real alternative (that might not work everywhere) was to create an ActiveX control or Flash control and draw the whole thing.
It was a network marketing company (like Amway) where members can see their complete network tree (people they have successfully infected/brainwashed).
I am still proud of it.
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Using Tables? OK, that's kinda cool.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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First Programmer: Back in the day, we didn't have Windows. A command-line was our only interface to the machine.
Second Programmer: Command-line?!? You had a command-line?!? All we had was punch cards to input all of our code.
First: Punch cards?!? You had punch cards?!? All we had was paper tape.
Second: Paper tape?!? You had paper tape?!? We had to hand toggle switches on the front of the machine and hand assemble all of our code.
First: Toggle switches?!? You had toggle switches?!? We had to wire wrap our 0's and 1's directly into the logic of the computer.
Second: 1's?!? You had 1's?!?
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Going back to the 90's I learned to program using a 16bit compiler for DOS which meant I had to deal with memory segmentation and near/far pointers.
Needing to use pointers to have more than 64k of data (and when I was working with multiple 64,000 byte screen buffers this was inevitable) forced me to actually learn how to use pointers for things beyond the textbook standard linked list, etc.
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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Long time ago...... programming a PDP 11/45 via the front console. Load an address and insert the octal instruction 014747. Then start running from the address you loaded the instruction (single stepping the execution is more fun!)
The "program", a single instruction, will cause the computer to run "backwards" and fill memory backwards from the starting point with 014747 until it gives a hardware trap (address error.)
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