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On 05/09/2012 11:06 AM, scott wrote:
>> My dad taught me to program in C64 BASIC. Or rather, he dictated a
>> program to me, and I'm just the one who typed it in. Later I sat down
>> and read the C64 manual from cover to cover. (No mean feat for a kid who
>> was nearly illiterate.)
>
> Hehe, I still remember the first program my dad showed me how to type
> in. It was in BBC BASIC and changed the screen mode to a graphics mode
> then drew two lines in the shape of a big "T" on the screen. The rest I
> learned myself by looking at other programs. There was no "draw circle"
> command so I copied a function from another program that did circles.
> For years I only knew sin and cos as those funny functions you use to
> draw a circle.
I first learned to program with the Commodore Plus 4 (for whatever
reason, not nearly as famous as the Commodore 64), and also the Sinclair
ZX Spectrum. Both have graphics commands in BASIC.
The C64, on the other hand, has no such features. Turning on graphics
mode requires an elaborate series of POKE commands. And then doing any
actual graphics requires even more complicated maths. And that's just to
turn pixels on or off. I never got as far as drawing any lines.
Now, the Sam Coupe (which you will presumably never have heard of) was a
sensational machine. It had a special ZX Spectrum compatibility mode,
but it also had internal 3 1/4" floppy drives, built-in MIDI ports,
128-colour graphics (!!!), digital audio playback (!!), and a huge user
manual which was a nearly complete tutorial to writing programs in
BASIC, as well as a comprehensive reference for every command in the
language. And this BASIC dialect had commands for such exotic feats as
"draw a line from A to B, turning through C degrees". Really, really
comprehensive.
>> We didn't have computers at school. (They /were/ a relatively new
>> commercial product, after all.) When they eventually got some, it fell
>> to the school's Religious Education teacher (no, seriously) to "teach us
>> about computers".
>
> We were a little ahead at my school, we had a specific IT teacher who
> seemed to mostly know his stuff - he often taught people a lesson for
> not logging out by moving all their files somewhere else when they
> weren't looking, most famously to the head of english :-). I got in
> trouble though when I figured out on the Acorn login window after you
> clicked OK it simply wrote a null character to the first letter of your
> password, the rest was still stored in memory, even after you logged
> out! After the IT teacher had logged out I found the location and read
> the bytes... "<NULL>OSSMAN". Nice... Apparently he used the same
> password for lots of accounts so had to change them all :-)
...and yet, it was YOU that got in trouble, not him. ;-)
>> By this point, I had already moved on from BASIC to Pascal, using both
>> Borland's TurboPascal 5.5 for MS-DOS, and on my Amiga Hi-Speed Pascal
>> (who's libraries are nearly identical to TurboPascal, despite the rather
>> different hardware). So say I knew more than the teacher did would be an
>> understatement.
>
> I moved on from BASIC to ARM assembler (which is infinitely easier than
> x86 assembler),
I moved on from C64 BASIC to C64 assembler - or rather, machine code. I
couldn't afford an actual assembler program. So I used to do it old
skool - you know, with pencil and paper and a giant opcode table. To
this day, I still know, from memory, that RTS [return from subroutine]
is opcode 96 decimal. Decimal because, to run it, you had to write one
of those programs. You know the ones...
10 FOR X = 1 TO 8
20 READ D
30 POKE (43252+X), D
40 NEXT X
50 :
60 DATA 46, 234, 64, 123...
And of course, in BASIC, you can only write numbers in decimal. :-P
Now the Acorn (or was it the Archimedes?) let you write assembler
statements in-line, in the middle of your BASIC program. And it had a
machine code debugger. Damn, that was nice...
> it was only once I got a PC that I got a free copy of
> Borland C++ Builder on a coverdisc.
I knew a guy, and he got me an illegal copy of TurboPascal from work. I
think I may still have those illegal disks somewhere... all 12 of them.
> Again I pretty much taught myself
> C++ from reading the samples that came on the disc, and maybe I borrowed
> a book or two once from the library.
I had a book from the OU which describes "UCSD Pascal". Complete with
notes about p-code and so forth. (It also compares Pascal to FORTRAN and
COBOL, because those are the only other high-level languages, aren't they?)
All the time I was using BASIC, I kept reading scattered references to
these "more powerful" languages like COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal and C. But I
couldn't imagine what "more powerful" would actually look like. Then I
read about Pascal, and it was instantly obvious what a massive, massive
increase in power if offered. I had to wait years to actually try it out
though. Heh.
> Oh we had plenty of teachers who didn't even know there was an on/off
> switch at the back of the machine. This was probably the first time in
> history where teachers suddenly get a load of kids who know more than
> them about something they are trying to teach!
Yeah... I still remember going to college and finding that our Pascal
tutor only found out two weeks ago that he was taking Pascal. So he's
teaching us what he's managed to learn from a book in two weeks. And I'm
like "WTF? Why am I paying for this when I could just read the book
myself?" I mean, college isn't exactly cheap... Where is the quality?
>> What, in the name of God, is an "app"?
>
> You answered your own question, app is short for application, it's come
> to be associated with small cheap applications that you download for
> mobile devices though.
Sure, I get where the name comes from. I don't get what the point is.
>> Suppose, for example, that you are somehow so stupendously rich that you
>> can not only afford to /buy/ an iPhone but also to pay the bills for it.
>
> phone and pretty much all your calls and data. There are cheaper
> alternatives from competitors like Samsung running Android from as low
> data (eg for just checking email and occasional browsing).
friends, so I guess that answers that one.
>> Through mechanisms which I do not really understand at all [Jesus Christ
>> I feel old!], it is apparently somehow possible to access the Internet
>> with such a device. (Presumably that's part of why it's so damned
>> expensive - along with the obvious fact that it's extremely shiny.)
>
> Ummm, haven't most phones allowed you to do that for some time now?
How would I know?
(You will note, of course, that I am *always* sitting in front of a
real, live computer. Why would I need a *phone* to access the Internet?)
>> Since we're here, I might as well ask: the iPad. Sure, I mean, I know
>> what it /is/, but... why? What is it /for/? Can anyone articulate a
>> coherent explanation?
>
> If you use a phone a lot to read email and browse the internet then
> you'd probably appreciate the larger screen.
It's still news to me that you /can/ use a phone to read email or browse
the net, but OK. I can see how a bigger screen would be beneficial. (I
can't even imagine how the **** you would look at a web page on a screen
that's less than an inch across...)
> The people I know who have
> them are either female or have a female to carry them around for them
LOL! You make them sound like slaves or something... Oh, wait.
> Or if you're used to using a laptop, an iPad is going to be smaller
> and lighter (and boot up much quicker).
On the other hand, you can't run any software on it. You can just browse
the Internet.
> Also once you've got used to using multi-touch it's painful to go back
> to a mouse (for things like scrolling and zooming). I still prefer a
> keyboard for typing lots of text, but for web addresses and short emails
> the iPad keyboard is fast enough.
I certainly see how having a larger control surface would make
interaction much easier. Laptop glide-pads are usually tiny, which makes
it really awkward to navigate a huge screen...
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