The old days.

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3 Comments

In my highschool days I was not a good student or very sociable. I did not like school work although I did well at math. I also had issues and was too shy to make freinds. In fact I am pretty sure that if for one thing that happened I would be a burden to society today. What happened is that my math teacher introduced me to the Digital PDP-8E that the school had for students to use at the time. I fell in love with that machine and played with it every chanch I got. I could not get enough of it. Most students programmed it using BASIC which is a pretty basic language. I on the other hand would write assembler code for it, hand assemble it, and key it in in binary on the front pannel. There was nothing more fun. Today I program computers for a living and do well at my chosen profession. With all the modern equipment I get to use you would think that I would forget that old pdp8 and be happy with what I do now. The truth however is that I miss that old machine. Is that normal?

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78% Normal
Based on 45 votes (35 yes)
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Comments ( 3 )
  • lola27
    13 years ago

    To reminisce is to be human, OP. I remember the days when you'd have to insert a floppy disk into a keyboard to start an app, then a second and third floppy disk for each stage of the app, and then you'd finally get to a blocky platformer game with the most irritating midi sound fx. But that WAS the avant garde, it was so damn cool to be at the forefront of that, it was so exciting.

    Now it's like, there are kids who can bring down entire computer networks with a downloaded executable they didn't even write. It's everywhere.....is it special anymore? Is it special like those old games were?

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  • BraindeadDaddy
    13 years ago

    To me perl is poetry, assembler is a novel, and php is light fiction. I now code to relax believe it or not :)

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  • dappled
    13 years ago

    We're geeks. I wrote assembly too (to the point where I didn't actually use an assembler at times), although I think I'm quite a bit younger than you (the PDPs had been and gone before I was even born). I sometimes wish I'd have been born earlier. It must have been fun back then, being a pioneer. Today I write in .Net (when I get the chance) and I often feel so distanced from what the computer is actually doing. People in that line of work who didn't have the childhood I had really can't appreciate the beauty and simplicity of assembly as a language. They're lost without their libraries. But it's so much more fun to write a byte directly to graphics memory or send an out to talk to the sound chip or hook an interrupt. It's amazing what could be squeezed out of a few 8-bit registers and less memory than an empty Word document.

    I was a published games writer at 15 and the buzz was incredible. But games now are so big and hungry they have to be team-written. I often have the thought of publishing for mobile phones and stuff, but I already work long enough hours as it is, and I'd still be using some kind of pre-written framework doing things I wouldn't know about. I guess our time has been and gone.

    Colleagues find it amusing that I still know the ASCII value of any character they throw at me, but I think they're disturbed that I know the ones below 32 and beyond 128. So yeah, I know exactly what you mean and I feel the same way.

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