A fond memory of assembly language
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As a predendum to my Cobol message I regret the passing of limited-length variable names. In IBM assembler it used to be 8 characters. I was updating some communication software, and it wasn't until I sorted out the variable names that the code began to make sense. Here are some of the variable names I remember and their meaning: yek - return key ecaps - backspace antelope - Line feed turfd - shift unyon - carat Sadly, I cannot remember many more...
Paul
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As a predendum to my Cobol message I regret the passing of limited-length variable names. In IBM assembler it used to be 8 characters. I was updating some communication software, and it wasn't until I sorted out the variable names that the code began to make sense. Here are some of the variable names I remember and their meaning: yek - return key ecaps - backspace antelope - Line feed turfd - shift unyon - carat Sadly, I cannot remember many more...
Paul
I wonder what "sentence" they built from these names :)
We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
My first real C# project | Linkify!|FoldWithUs! | sighist -
As a predendum to my Cobol message I regret the passing of limited-length variable names. In IBM assembler it used to be 8 characters. I was updating some communication software, and it wasn't until I sorted out the variable names that the code began to make sense. Here are some of the variable names I remember and their meaning: yek - return key ecaps - backspace antelope - Line feed turfd - shift unyon - carat Sadly, I cannot remember many more...
Paul
Ah the memories, those were the good old days. Haven't programmed assembly in many years (8086 - 80386) but used to be language of choice. Thanks for the memories Mike
Theres light at the end of the tunnel. Lord I hope it ain't no train!
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As a predendum to my Cobol message I regret the passing of limited-length variable names. In IBM assembler it used to be 8 characters. I was updating some communication software, and it wasn't until I sorted out the variable names that the code began to make sense. Here are some of the variable names I remember and their meaning: yek - return key ecaps - backspace antelope - Line feed turfd - shift unyon - carat Sadly, I cannot remember many more...
Paul
Ret Orrick wrote:
Sadly, I cannot remember many more...
I'm amazed you could remember those. :wtf: I remember in one assembler program, we had a PREG (basically, a record structure definition) that was being used during a batch update process. The original dev called it BTCHPREG. :rolleyes:
BW
Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand.
Ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand.
-- Neil Peart -
Ret Orrick wrote:
Sadly, I cannot remember many more...
I'm amazed you could remember those. :wtf: I remember in one assembler program, we had a PREG (basically, a record structure definition) that was being used during a batch update process. The original dev called it BTCHPREG. :rolleyes:
BW
Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand.
Ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand.
-- Neil Peartobviously management was too intimidated by assembly to participate in code reviews of any sort. :rolleyes:
-- CleaKO The sad part about this instance is that none of the users ever said anything [about the problem]. Pete O`Hanlon Doesn't that just tell you everything you need to know about users?
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As a predendum to my Cobol message I regret the passing of limited-length variable names. In IBM assembler it used to be 8 characters. I was updating some communication software, and it wasn't until I sorted out the variable names that the code began to make sense. Here are some of the variable names I remember and their meaning: yek - return key ecaps - backspace antelope - Line feed turfd - shift unyon - carat Sadly, I cannot remember many more...
Paul
Some of my earliest serious work was done in F77 on a PDP-11 running RSX-11 and it had the name length limit. It wasn't that big of an issue then as I recall. Shortly thereafter we moved to VAXes and its dialect of FORTRAN had no name length limits. These days, every time I see assembly language I am reminded why high level languages were invented.
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Some of my earliest serious work was done in F77 on a PDP-11 running RSX-11 and it had the name length limit. It wasn't that big of an issue then as I recall. Shortly thereafter we moved to VAXes and its dialect of FORTRAN had no name length limits. These days, every time I see assembly language I am reminded why high level languages were invented.
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Some of my earliest serious work was done in F77 on a PDP-11 running RSX-11 and it had the name length limit. It wasn't that big of an issue then as I recall. Shortly thereafter we moved to VAXes and its dialect of FORTRAN had no name length limits. These days, every time I see assembly language I am reminded why high level languages were invented.
One of first jobs, when I first moved to Florida was on a PDP-11 (Assembler and C). We quickly moved to MicroVaxes. They were actually pretty decent machines for the day. Mike
Theres light at the end of the tunnel. Lord I hope it ain't no train!
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One of first jobs, when I first moved to Florida was on a PDP-11 (Assembler and C). We quickly moved to MicroVaxes. They were actually pretty decent machines for the day. Mike
Theres light at the end of the tunnel. Lord I hope it ain't no train!
Mike Hankey wrote:
MicroVaxes
i loved VAX assembly. it was halfway to BASIC - you could print to the console with one command.
image processing toolkits | batch image processing | blogging
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Mike Hankey wrote:
MicroVaxes
i loved VAX assembly. it was halfway to BASIC - you could print to the console with one command.
image processing toolkits | batch image processing | blogging
Yes it was definitely a high level assembly...during my early days I decided to go with VAXes and ignored PCs...what a mistake! But in the early days of PC I didn't see much of a future in the manufacturing and scientific communities for PCs just didn't have the horse power of the MicroVAX, etc.. Mike
Theres light at the end of the tunnel. Lord I hope it ain't no train!
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Yes it was definitely a high level assembly...during my early days I decided to go with VAXes and ignored PCs...what a mistake! But in the early days of PC I didn't see much of a future in the manufacturing and scientific communities for PCs just didn't have the horse power of the MicroVAX, etc.. Mike
Theres light at the end of the tunnel. Lord I hope it ain't no train!
I did a fair amount of work on VAXes a few decades ago. :) One of my most vivid memories is of a project we did that controlled a steel mill with VAXes, PDP-11s, and Modicon PLCs. We used the RTU protocol to talk to the PLCs and it used a CRC alogrithm for the checksum that would bring a 780 to its knees. One day the local repair tech came in to do an upgrade. DEC had implemented a new CRC instruction that was immensely faster and the tech had to do a whole bunch of wire-wrapping on the machine's 2x2 foot CPU circuit board to install the patch. :omg: We sure have come a long way in the 20+ years since then. Now the contents of at least four of those VAX CPU boards can fit on a single chip of less than a half a square inch that will consume far less power, perform thousands of times better, and its microcode can be updated electronically. That Modicon 584 PLC was something else too. It had three circuit boards that were each roughly 2x2 feet in size, it used hundreds of AMD bite-slice chips to implement its processors, and it was the size of a small under-desk refrigerator. The afore-mentioned steel mill project utilized a whole bunch of them in redundancy configurations that had three of those refrigerator-sized boxes in a massive enclosure for "one" PLC. Today most PLCs are so reliable that redundant configurations are not needed nearly as often. It was needed there because a failure could result hundreds of tons of solidified steel that would be a huge PITA to deal with. By cracky, you young whipper snappers sure have it easy these days. :cool:
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I did a fair amount of work on VAXes a few decades ago. :) One of my most vivid memories is of a project we did that controlled a steel mill with VAXes, PDP-11s, and Modicon PLCs. We used the RTU protocol to talk to the PLCs and it used a CRC alogrithm for the checksum that would bring a 780 to its knees. One day the local repair tech came in to do an upgrade. DEC had implemented a new CRC instruction that was immensely faster and the tech had to do a whole bunch of wire-wrapping on the machine's 2x2 foot CPU circuit board to install the patch. :omg: We sure have come a long way in the 20+ years since then. Now the contents of at least four of those VAX CPU boards can fit on a single chip of less than a half a square inch that will consume far less power, perform thousands of times better, and its microcode can be updated electronically. That Modicon 584 PLC was something else too. It had three circuit boards that were each roughly 2x2 feet in size, it used hundreds of AMD bite-slice chips to implement its processors, and it was the size of a small under-desk refrigerator. The afore-mentioned steel mill project utilized a whole bunch of them in redundancy configurations that had three of those refrigerator-sized boxes in a massive enclosure for "one" PLC. Today most PLCs are so reliable that redundant configurations are not needed nearly as often. It was needed there because a failure could result hundreds of tons of solidified steel that would be a huge PITA to deal with. By cracky, you young whipper snappers sure have it easy these days. :cool:
Yes we have come a long way. When I first came to Florida I was hired to write the control and monitoring software for a water treatment plant in Ft. Meyers. The first day I showed up for the job I met with my boss and asked him where he wanted me to start and what he wanted done. He dug around his desk littered with food and stuff I wouldn't touch and dug out a photo of a touch screen controls for another water plant and pointed to it. We had a PDP-11 with touch screens from Canada that broke every other day and we had a hell of a time getting them through customs or whatever. But I got to go there when we installed them and travel around with the techs and look at the field hardware...controllers and whatnot. It was interesting! We had it a tad harder in the day...inprov was common and fly by the seat of your pants a lot of the time with hardware and software that was new and unreliable. You had to know a lot more about a lot more then just to get by. I could go on but your right these days the younguns have a lot of education but little field experience. Mike
Theres light at the end of the tunnel. Lord I hope it ain't no train!
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As a predendum to my Cobol message I regret the passing of limited-length variable names. In IBM assembler it used to be 8 characters. I was updating some communication software, and it wasn't until I sorted out the variable names that the code began to make sense. Here are some of the variable names I remember and their meaning: yek - return key ecaps - backspace antelope - Line feed turfd - shift unyon - carat Sadly, I cannot remember many more...
Paul
I did a lot of assembly back on the 6502, but we never had the luxury of variables in the early assemblers. We had to remember the addresses of various Kernel routines and same for variables, and there was absolutely no moving around of things to different locations. It was screwey because on an Apple II, FFD2 was the same kernel routine as FFDE on the Commodore, so nothing translated. When I got my first C compiler I was in heaven - and it sucked big time by todays standards.
"Quality Software since 1983!"
http://www.smoothjazzy.com/ - see the "Programming" section for freeware tools and articles. -
Yes we have come a long way. When I first came to Florida I was hired to write the control and monitoring software for a water treatment plant in Ft. Meyers. The first day I showed up for the job I met with my boss and asked him where he wanted me to start and what he wanted done. He dug around his desk littered with food and stuff I wouldn't touch and dug out a photo of a touch screen controls for another water plant and pointed to it. We had a PDP-11 with touch screens from Canada that broke every other day and we had a hell of a time getting them through customs or whatever. But I got to go there when we installed them and travel around with the techs and look at the field hardware...controllers and whatnot. It was interesting! We had it a tad harder in the day...inprov was common and fly by the seat of your pants a lot of the time with hardware and software that was new and unreliable. You had to know a lot more about a lot more then just to get by. I could go on but your right these days the younguns have a lot of education but little field experience. Mike
Theres light at the end of the tunnel. Lord I hope it ain't no train!
I was working on contract for a USA chemical company Grace. They were replacing old IBM 360s scattered round Europe with PDP-11s acting as RJE stations to two large IBM 370s in France and Germany. One of the advantages of those days is that if somethig needed to be done you had to go there to do it. I worked in a half a dozen countries. From there I developed itchy feet. Amsterdam for two years, UK, France, Germany, Thailand, Sweden, Switzerland. And latterly, 6 years in Florida and 5 in Canada. For many years my life seemed like an assembly.. :startAgain Shift country Register @police Branch :startAgain Some people have jobs, other have careers. I've just had experiences. Oh yes, and I've worked in at least 5 countries where the people will tell you it's the best country in the world. Can you guess which?
Paul
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I did a lot of assembly back on the 6502, but we never had the luxury of variables in the early assemblers. We had to remember the addresses of various Kernel routines and same for variables, and there was absolutely no moving around of things to different locations. It was screwey because on an Apple II, FFD2 was the same kernel routine as FFDE on the Commodore, so nothing translated. When I got my first C compiler I was in heaven - and it sucked big time by todays standards.
"Quality Software since 1983!"
http://www.smoothjazzy.com/ - see the "Programming" section for freeware tools and articles.What you needed was a macro pre-processor. I wrote one in Basic, and it just replaced keywords with absolute addresses. This was mainly for s100 bus stuff. Did not do much on the 6502, mainly Z80 and 8080/6. Then I discovered the 68000 series. It had a far better architecture than the 8086 / 80286. What a pity Intel won that race, via the IBM PC. I promise this is coincidence. I wrote the following http://www.codeproject.com/Feature/HallOfShame.asp?select=1985951&forumid=392254&fr=46&df=100#xx1985951xx[^] before visiting smoothjazzy. You've already helped to answer the final question ;)
Paul
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What you needed was a macro pre-processor. I wrote one in Basic, and it just replaced keywords with absolute addresses. This was mainly for s100 bus stuff. Did not do much on the 6502, mainly Z80 and 8080/6. Then I discovered the 68000 series. It had a far better architecture than the 8086 / 80286. What a pity Intel won that race, via the IBM PC. I promise this is coincidence. I wrote the following http://www.codeproject.com/Feature/HallOfShame.asp?select=1985951&forumid=392254&fr=46&df=100#xx1985951xx[^] before visiting smoothjazzy. You've already helped to answer the final question ;)
Paul
What question? I'm not sure that link is correct... it just takes me back to this same thread?
"Quality Software since 1983!"
http://www.smoothjazzy.com/ - see the "Programming" section for freeware tools and articles. -
What question? I'm not sure that link is correct... it just takes me back to this same thread?
"Quality Software since 1983!"
http://www.smoothjazzy.com/ - see the "Programming" section for freeware tools and articles.My question was.... Oh yes, and I've worked in at least 5 countries where the people will tell you it's the best country in the world. Can you guess which? When I went to your site it said the USA was the best country in the world. So you've got the first of the the five that sprang to mind. Best wishes from an ex systems engineer
Paul
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My question was.... Oh yes, and I've worked in at least 5 countries where the people will tell you it's the best country in the world. Can you guess which? When I went to your site it said the USA was the best country in the world. So you've got the first of the the five that sprang to mind. Best wishes from an ex systems engineer
Paul
I can actually rank the places I'd like to live, tell me how close I am to your list... 1. USA 2. Canada 3. England 4. Japan 5. Germany (I speak the languages in those places)
"Quality Software since 1983!"
http://www.smoothjazzy.com/ - see the "Programming" section for freeware tools and articles. -
I was working on contract for a USA chemical company Grace. They were replacing old IBM 360s scattered round Europe with PDP-11s acting as RJE stations to two large IBM 370s in France and Germany. One of the advantages of those days is that if somethig needed to be done you had to go there to do it. I worked in a half a dozen countries. From there I developed itchy feet. Amsterdam for two years, UK, France, Germany, Thailand, Sweden, Switzerland. And latterly, 6 years in Florida and 5 in Canada. For many years my life seemed like an assembly.. :startAgain Shift country Register @police Branch :startAgain Some people have jobs, other have careers. I've just had experiences. Oh yes, and I've worked in at least 5 countries where the people will tell you it's the best country in the world. Can you guess which?
Paul
Paul,
Ret Orrick wrote:
One of the advantages of those days is that if somethig needed to be done you had to go there to do it.
Yeh the good old days. Most of my traveling was in U.S. but I saw some incredible sights and some awesome experiences. But I lost a wife of 20 yrs in the process, I loved to travel and she didn't like me traveling. If I had to do again I'd still would of traveled! I'm in Jacksonville, FL. where did you stay while here? Mike
Theres light at the end of the tunnel. Lord I hope it ain't no train!
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Paul,
Ret Orrick wrote:
One of the advantages of those days is that if somethig needed to be done you had to go there to do it.
Yeh the good old days. Most of my traveling was in U.S. but I saw some incredible sights and some awesome experiences. But I lost a wife of 20 yrs in the process, I loved to travel and she didn't like me traveling. If I had to do again I'd still would of traveled! I'm in Jacksonville, FL. where did you stay while here? Mike
Theres light at the end of the tunnel. Lord I hope it ain't no train!
