You whippersnappers may not remember there was a time when there was no commercial software, with the exception of assemblers and, if you were lucky, compilers. Somebody showed you how to punch cards or paper tape and gave you an instruction manual. (Thinking Datatron 205 or IBM 1620.)
So there were mostly no bugs except your own. There was little "OS" except a boot loader. There was no "network" and no bad guys lurking around.
I wrote a whole bunch of stuff in Basica, because it was already there, free, and came with a complete manual.
I discovered Assembler when I couldn't get bascia to be fast enough, and got C and Pascal along with it.
Remember PWB, Programmers workbench?
It had a macro language built in that allowed me to keep using the assembler libs I bought well into the late 90's.
The NT programming model finally broke all those tools, as well as the hard drives being over 2GB, lol. PWB can't open a virtual file on a disk over 2GB, and making small partitions can be iffy, lol.
But programs I compiled in 1988 to an exe file still work on 32bit oses, even thru win7.
Of course the one I use the most is for making 1st ed AD&D characters, lol.
Do it yourself? (Score:2)
You whippersnappers may not remember there was a time when there was no commercial software, with the exception of assemblers and, if you were lucky, compilers. Somebody showed you how to punch cards or paper tape and gave you an instruction manual. (Thinking Datatron 205 or IBM 1620.)
So there were mostly no bugs except your own. There was little "OS" except a boot loader. There was no "network" and no bad guys lurking around.
It was a lot of fun.
Re:Do it yourself? (Score:2)
I wrote a whole bunch of stuff in Basica, because it was already there, free, and came with a complete manual.
I discovered Assembler when I couldn't get bascia to be fast enough, and got C and Pascal along with it.
Remember PWB, Programmers workbench?
It had a macro language built in that allowed me to keep using the assembler libs I bought well into the late 90's.
The NT programming model finally broke all those tools, as well as the hard drives being over 2GB, lol.
PWB can't open a virtual file on a disk over 2GB, and making small partitions can be iffy, lol.
But programs I compiled in 1988 to an exe file still work on 32bit oses, even thru win7.
Of course the one I use the most is for making 1st ed AD&D characters, lol.