>> 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.
>
> Ouch. Good job the instructions were only 8 bit then...

Oh, it's not /that/ bad. The 6502 only has a few dozen instructions, 
each with a handful of addressing modes. Sure, that makes hundreds of 
possible opcodes, but you hardly ever use most of them.

I did attempt to /write/ an assembler. Or at least, a BASIC program with 
the entire opcode list contained in DATA statements. But long before I 
finished the data entry part, the program was already taking /way/ too 
long to do a linear search for the right opcode. If only I knew back 
them about hash tables and binary search trees. ;-)

>> All the time I was using BASIC, I kept reading scattered references to
>> these "more powerful" languages like COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal and C.
>
> Oh I never heard of anything like that until there was a short series of
> articles in my Acorn magazine about programming in C. But then the C
> compiler was useless on the Acorn, it required more RAM than 99.9% of
> Acorns had at that time so you needed to use it with some buggy virtual
> memory program that was very slow.

I'm guessing you're talking about a slightly different time frame. 
Alternatively, maybe you just read different literature than I did.

(I still have a kids' science book which proudly proclaims that the most 
powerful computer ever to exist is the Cray II. It broke the 1 gigaFLOPS 
barrier. Aaaand then my current GPU produces about 480 gigaFLOPS, so....)

>> 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.
>
> I spent several years hacking around with C++ and Glide (the API for
> 3Dfx cards), then DirectX. But I got really frustrated in that to do
> anything useful (ie windows, graphics, sound, network/database stuff)
> you needed to find libraries and because I'm not a professional
> programmer I always had problems getting them to work, or the
> documentation sucked.
>
> I briefly used MS's managed C++ for a bit, but quickly moved onto C# and
> have been using that now for the last few years. It suits my needs
> perfectly, and even if I don't do any coding for several months I can
> get back into it pretty much instantly.

I did Pascal for years. We "learned" Pascal at college. And C. (I still 
remember reading an introductory C book and thinking "eew, yuck!") 
Between college and uni I learned Java (and object-oriented 
programming.) At uni we did Smalltalk [which I've never heard of before 
or since], and then Java. At Graham's suggestion, I learned Eiffel. And 
since then, I've learned PostScript, Tcl, I've at least looked at Lisp 
and Prolog, and then of course I learned Haskell and never looked back.

[I wonder exactly when I learned Haskell... I honestly can't remember. 
One day I found a TeX document I wrote about Haskell, and it was dated 5 
years ago, and I was like OMG! Really?? I still thought I'd only been 
using it a few weeks...]

>> Sure, I get where the name comes from. I don't get what the point is.
>
> Surely you get the point in general, you mean you don't get the point of
> why installing an application on a phone or tablet might be useful?

I don't get why you would install an app which just displays the 
contents of a specific web page. I mean, isn't that what a web browser 
already does??

Then again, mobile isn't the only platform with "apps". You get spades 
of them on Facebook. I keep getting notifications that this app or that 
app wants to access my stuff. (Obviously, I click the "go **** yourself" 
button.)

>> How would I know?
>
> You must have seen other people with phones, or at least heard of what a
> blackberry is? Or seen adverts from Samsapple about their products?

I know that other people /have/ phones. I wouldn't know what their 
actual capabilities are though. I don't often interact with other humans 
in person.

Come to think of it, I did have to set up a Blackberry once. It had the 
most horrid controls. A track ball that you click by pressing on it (in 
other words, as soon as you try to click a button, the cursor moves 
away). The keys were so tiny even my skinny fingers couldn't operate 
them. And trying to type in a 20-letter string of gibberish when it 
keeps trying to correct the spelling just isn't fun... It never did work 
in the end.

>> (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?)
>
> Lots of people do other things though away from a computer, and having a
> phone allows you to read email within 1 second or look up something on
> google within 10 seconds without having to walk away and boot up a PC
> (if there is even one nearby).

Sure. I'm saying this would not be useful /to me/. Not everyone is like 
me though.

>> 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...)
>
> My phone's 800x480 I think (and about 4 inches across), and I spent many
> years staring at a 640x480 screen, so it does nicely :-)

It's like you can get those portable DVD players, which invariably have 
a 4-inch screen. Somehow, watching a picture that's so tiny you can 
barely make out the actors' faces just doesn't seem as enjoyable as 
watching it on a huge 40-inch display... But maybe that's just me. After 
all, they sell these stupid things for many hundreds of pounds, so 
*somebody* must be buying them...

> Also most web
> pages recognise you're on a mobile device and give a different layout to
> the desktop version.

That sounds /highly/ unlikely...

> People have thought about this.

OK, that sounds almost completely impossible! :-P

>> On the other hand, you can't run any software on it. You can just browse
>> the Internet.
>
> Err no, you can install software, in fact I suspect that is where they
> make a lot of money from. On my Android phone I even downloaded the
> development stuff (for free) and made a simple program in Java, it took
> an afternoon or something to get setup (and I don't even know Java!) and
> works very easily - you have it hooked up via USB, and when you hit
> "run" in the IDE within 2 seconds it's compiled and running on your phone.

It's not minimal CPU power, no input devices other than a touch screen, 
and a fairly small display. What useful software could you possibly run?

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