there were times when programming was like this ...

BillWoodruff

family-safe video: [^] when something emerged from the tedium of complexity, the struggle with bugs, the wrestling match with the limits of hardware and software, the psychodramas of "developers, developers, developers" ... something that approached art ... not just mastery, but, a sense of graceful, playful, unity of mind and context ... always a transient eternity that boomeranged you back to temporal same-old ... i hold on to those memories now ... dearly ... as, i'm sure, you hold on to yours

Quote:

"Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion." Marcus Aurelius: "Meditations"

«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali

raddevus

BillWoodruff wrote:

there were times when programming was like this ...

I agree. Especially the part where she is riding the bicycle backwards. It is often necessary to do things completely differently and we have to be creative along the way. That may mean using the tools in completely new ways. :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

den2k88

BillWoodruff wrote:

the wrestling match with the limits of hardware and software, the psychodramas of "developers, developers, developers" ... something that approached art

Work in automotive, we get those everyday. Most autmotive ECUs have 64 or 129 KB of RAM and a whopping 2MB of flash. They also have to manage signals in real time with granularities up to the millisecond and often are single core, <700 Mhz clock. It *is* fun.

GCS d--(d+) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X

David ONeil

Only after segmented memory access was pretty much eliminated with 32-bit chips! God - the horrors of that code for breaking the 16-bit memory ceiling! (I say that as someone who was just dabbling in programming at the time and never did anything with it, and seriously questioned my resolve to continue programming because of it. If you have memories of mastery from those days, my hat is off to you.)

The forgotten roots of science | C++ Programming | DWinLib

pkfox

:thumbsup:

"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP

MarkTJohnson

Why is she in a dress?

BillWoodruff

Why not ?

«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali

Danny Martin

Got to get me some of them 'Rose Tinted Specs'... As I recall it was more like hitting yourself over the head with a unicycle. ;P

Martin ISDN

16-bit segmented memory... awful is not enough. that made me sleep for a looong time. i directly switched from 8bit to 32bits and by that time i was seriously behind people using high level languages. i remember how i tried to create an array of 40k integers and the compiler was like, you run out of memory? this computer with 2MB of RAM cannot have an array of 40k integers? how is that any better than my C64? somewhere in the wide open world there were machines with 680x0 Motorola's, but not in my shit hole.

Martin ISDN

and there are some, now irrelevant, horror stories from that time still in circulation. how the stack segment and stack pointer are so minuscule that you can have real problems so stay away from recursion. thank Almighty Bob for the 32bit SP. finally the stack pointer can address the total address space.

BillWoodruff

for most of us mere mortals ... those rare moments of mastery and balance are as unforgettable as they are unique :omg:

«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali

computer_nerd

I'm surprised at how long the bike is able to freewheel round in a circle when she's standing on the saddle and not pedalling

Mark Starr

Fascinating. And, thanks for the Marcus Aurelius quote. I haven’t read Meditations in almost 20 years. Guess I need to pick it up again. > I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul > - Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Soul and God, The Red Book, p. 234

Time is the differentiation of eternity devised by man to measure the passage of human events. - Manly P. Hall Mark Just another cog in the wheel

Matt Bond

That's a typical dancer's outfit. The skirt is short so it doesn't interfere with her movements/get hung on the props/makes it easier to be caught by the male ballerina. Bond Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere

Gary R Wheeler

David O'Neil wrote:

If you have memories of mastery from those days, my hat is off to you

I remember those days fairly well. In the early 1990's I worked on controller software for a small commercial ink-jet printing system. The app ran under the DOS/4GW(*1) DOS extender, which let my app run in 32-bit protected mode under MS-DOS. Whenever you made an MS-DOS function call or a hardware interrupt was triggered, the extended would switch to real mode, make the call, and then switch back to protected mode. Since this was time-consuming, you spent a lot of effort to not have to switch modes. One of the techniques was called bimodal interrupt handling. You essentially had a protected service registered for protected mode, and a real mode service for real mode. The tricky parts were having the two modes share data and code. Modern programmers would drop their ladyparts on the floor. (*1) The same extender used by Doom(*2). (*2) In 1982 I implemented the same hidden-surface removal algorithm used by Doom.

Software Zen: delete this;

W Balboos GHB

And, along with all the other explanations, Beautiful Legs

Ravings en masse^

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein

"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010

Gary R Wheeler

There's a bicycle tour I've ridden almost a dozen times. Two of the regulars are a young Amish woman and her aunt. They ride in ankle-length dresses without any apparent difficulty. Their high-tech helmets and cycling shoes seem incongrous.

Software Zen: delete this;

englebart

Even with the pointer hassles, it was amazing what you could accomplish in windows 2.1 with 640KB of usable ram on a 12Mhz chip: running multiple apps including Excel that used DDE for IPC.

JP Reyes

Ah the good ol' times. Not so long ago I used a C++ 2003 compliant (or at least '98) compiler from Codewarrior to build games on a Nintendo DS, with only 4MB of ram. Unlike what the C++ core pushes you do to do, the use of the standard library was not an option if you wanted to keep within speed and memory tolerance. Templates were all but forbidden (waste of clock cycles they would say). By and far we mostly coded as if it were C and ARM32 assembler only. We did use objects but only for the advantages objects in C would offer (generic programming, the boost library and all the present day fanciness was unheard of). We built our own everything (anything GPL'd was strictly forbidden by Nintendo). Yet I don't see why I would ever abandon such practices, for videogames. Security (outside of the usual network encryptions) is still highly overrated in these "electronic toys" (the saying goes "if they can hack it to enhance their fun, more power to them") Bygone days