Pencil-and-paper -programming

While cleaning up some old cupboards I found an old booklet from 198-something. At that tender age of fifteen-ish, instead of going to hockey practice or hanging out with other kids in the mall, I wrote Z80 assembly language programs with paper and a pencil; something that I had completely forgotten. I didn't have money for an assembler, so I painstakingly looked up the hex code equivalents for the mnemonics and then wrote a BASIC program to write those into memory.

My bedtime reading at the time was "The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly" - a book full of commented machine code. Which, in retrospect, was a bit sad, but on the other hand, it gave me a very complete understanding of how a computer works. And that has been very useful in my career.

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Comments

At least you *had* a computer.

We got our first computer in 1988 or so. Before that, I read the Basic books my father got somewhere, probably from his work. I then wrote the programs I wanted to do on paper, because I had no computer. The first non-trivial program I wrote was a roulette simulation, in quite generic Basic.

The next day after writing it, I went to a friend's place and we wrote the program into his C=64. Then we played roulette. I don't remember if we saved in on a cassette, but at least I still have the program on paper.

I also might be a bit of a geek: couple of years after I got the first computer (an XT clone) I had gotten also Turbo Pascal 6.0 and did Pascal stuff. Some years ago I found a list of personal improvements we did I think in the beginning of the eight grade. One of the things I had written was "Learn 80x86 assembler". I also did that, and wrote programs with it.

--Pare, 24-Feb-2013


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"Main_blogentry_230213_1" last changed on 23-Feb-2013 14:59:25 EET by JanneJalkanen.
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