John VanSickle wrote:

> I had the whole instruction set, and the opcodes, memorized at one point 
> in life.  There were less than 160 of them to remember, so it wasn't hard.
> 
> During the 1985-87 time frame, I wrote a word processor, in assembler, 
> for my C64, I entered most of it as machine code as I went along.  It 
> worked quite well (given that it only had to send Epson-compatible 
> formatting codes for things like italics, bold face, and so on); I wrote 
> a short novel using it.

Jesus! o_O

I just wrote the assembly on a piece of paper, and when the program was 
properly finished, it'd do the "assembling" part by hand. (I.e., open my 
dad's book and leaf through the op-code table.)

Eventually I tired of this, and wrote by old assembler.

*cough*

Well OK - wrote my own program to look up op-codes anyway. I typed the 
whole op-code table into the computer (remember DATA statements?) and 
wrote a program that does a trivial linear search to find the op-code 
for the mnumonic I typed in. It was astonishingly slow, actually... hmm...

I didn't know much about algorithms back then. Give me a break! I was 
only 11...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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