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Greg Utas wrote: Haven't written any in over 40 years, since writing it on a PDP-10
Wow, that is cool. I believe that might be the hardware that Gates and Allen began with. 
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It was a great system, but maybe I remember it much as one remembers a first love. 
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Greg Utas wrote: It was a great system, but maybe I remember it much as one remembers a first love
Yeah, that's how we all are with our first OSes. I even remember DOS 3.3 / Windows 3.1 fondly now.  Well, maybe not. But Win95, for sure. Pre-emptive multitasking was dreamy. Format a 3.5" disk while playing minesweeper was really cool.
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Indeed.
My first brush with assembler was writing little games etc in Z80 code on a self-built NASCOM1 computer.
My first major contract was porting MSDOS 1.25 to an IBM PC Clone. The disk drivers etc were all written in 8086 assembler. I can still see the thousands of pages of printed listing that I had to work on! (Filled with useless comments of the sort: "-- add 23 to AX")
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Me too, also NASCOM1. No assembler, only machine language. I remember things like 3E 00 41 05 ...
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Oh yes - you soon learned the various opcodes 8)
I used to write it out as assembler on a coding sheet, write out the opcodes and then key them in!
All these years later, despite the higher level languages and huge compute power, things haven't really changed as much as you might think. I just spent a whole day trawling through the code for a framework I'm using because its documentation tells you how to pass some data through to a sub-system, but absolutely nowhere, in text or examples, does it specify the format that data has to take!
Doubly annoying because it isn't in the same format as you pass exactly the same data to the parent code 8)
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Exactly.raddevus wrote: it's never been easier to try than now
Not sure I agree with that. In 1979 I'd turn on my UK101 (similar to the Nascom) and it would prompt for BASIC or MONITOR. Choosing MONITOR gave you a 2-character input field where you could type in the hex value of the byte at address 00. Press ENTER and it moved to address 01. (You had to convert the 6502 assembly instructions into bytes in your head or on paper first, but there were only 56 instructions so it didn't take long to memorise at least the common ones.) 
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Mike Winiberg wrote: My first major contract was porting MSDOS 1.25 to an IBM PC Clone
Wow! I wouldn't have even known where to start. How did you discover the details back then?
Very difficult, very few books if any on stuff. Maybe the old Peter Norton book. Really interesting.
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You were given the sources for the relevant device drivers by Microsoft, but - as I said - the comments generally didn't give much away, so it was a lot of assembling and hardware debugging using logic analysers etc 8)
Of course back in those days, MS et al published printed manuals for their software etc - you didn't have to rely on intermittent broadband connections to websites with out of date or incomplete, badly formatted docs on them!
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VAX 11 assembly language in the late-80s for me.
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I started out on the PDP-11 but it was with DIBOL.
Scott
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Greg Utas wrote: Haven't written any in over 40 years, since writing it on a PDP-10 while at university. But it definitely has a charm to it.
Back in my day, we used to carve our code with a hammer and chisle on stone punch cards.
Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.
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I remember painting my first program on a cave wall somewhere in France.
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Yes, that led to the very first method: CRN (Convert Roman Numerals).
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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In the 1980's I was using a PDP-11/34a in High School. I LOVED MACRO-11 Assembly Language.
Basically it was C without the {}, LOL...
I was running RSTS/E time sharing (32K Words of memory to support almost 30 users). RK06 Drives.
Paper Terminals (Decwriter 300s I Believe, and we had 3 CRTs. One with COLOR, DEC 240?)
EDT for an editor (or TECO if you were on paper. Imagine EDLIN with Type-ahead! ex$$)
Curious, Gates replied to me that they were running TOPS-10 for the O/S on the PDP-10.
I am still amazed by everything I was able to learn/do while in High School.
My 3 Favorites:
1) I learned how to read another users keyboard buffer ("You spelled that wrong!", LOL)
2) I learned how to HALT the computer, and force my non-priv user to be a super-user! Awesome! (JFPRIV? Bit)... thanks to Michael Mayfields Book on the internals of RSTS/E book I bought with my own cash!
http://www.dmv.net/dec/pdf/rsts80inta.pdf WOW... I remembered JFPRIV correctly after 32 YEARS!
3) I rewrote the startup routines so the 7-10 minute startup process was done in under a minute!
[I cheated. 80% of the time was changing the terminals to 300 Baud, etc. I recompiled the operating system, and modified the assembly, so the terminal settings were right for 30/33 terminals, and then only fixed the remaining 3. Even that, I rewrote in ASSEMBLY vs. BASIC PLUS 2 (BP2)]
4) I figured out how to open a tape as a non-structured file and modify it. This allowed me to copy the boot instructions from a DISK (which I learned was literally a boot loader), and write it to the tape, with a device adjustment. Making the tape, in fact, bootable. [I think I did this just after I graduated, because we did NOT have a tape drive, but I landed a job programming on PDP-11/70s]
Oh, those were the days...
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Great stuff, thanks for sharing.
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I got to use MASM with x86 assembly in undergrad. Wasn't a great experience.
I've used it once since then, to cheat in a game that had anti-cheat protection. 
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Kris Lantz wrote: I've used it once since then, to cheat in a game that had anti-cheat protection.
Minesweeper was never the same after that.
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But does it cover 6502?
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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I grew up on 6502 - instead of cereals and milk... 
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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My first bit of tech was an NES, which did sport a version of the 6502, but there was absolutely no requirement to know what was going on inside. I only went down the path of learning 8-bit computers and assembly so I could get a better grasp at programming fundamentals. Making the emulator has been massively fun and definitely addressed the fundamentals.
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Or Z80? 8080? 8008?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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That's going to be a big No.
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I started out with Z80 and 6809 machine code, there were no assemblers available to me back then. I wrote my first code like this around 40 years ago which was a ROM extension for Basic to control sound and speech hardware. Thinking back and comparing to the likes of modern assemblers or VS I have no idea how I managed it!
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