The 6502 does ring a bell about the rep-card...
Liked that Z-80 (alternate register set for task-switching?), but Motorola 32-bit was my top choice, at the time...
Gonna have to find those big fat 3 vol. books I bought back then:
Everything about all uProcessors currently manufactured.
(Back around 1928!)
Ever see "Pirates of Silicon Valley" ?
aaahhh my first assembly program, bbc basic with inline assembly on a whatchmacallit with a 6502. Acorn that it.
Big square thing with odd coloured keys.
1928, did you know it was the halfsister of lord Byron, Augusta Lovelace who actually came with the idea of a programmable computer in the mid 19th century?. Seems he had a torrid affair with her.
Not many people know that
haha i did a report about ada lovelace and her notes
did you know the first computer bug was actually a moth stuck in the machine thats why they started calling them bugs
i thought that was pretty funny
Ah yes,
The "Ada" programming language:
The US Department of Defense mandated "Standard-programming-language"...
Went to school in San Jose, Digital Equipment Corp.
Very good instructor and relaxed classes.
Isolated room in cafeteria for the evil-devil smokers.
Began conversion of FORTRAN missile-tracking stuff to "Ada".
Another two bite the dust:
DEC destroyed by Compaq/HP,
Ada never came...
Bug:
Software bug - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pertinent PS:The invention of the term is often erroneously attributed to Grace Hopper, who publicized the cause of a malfunction in an early electromechanical computer.[4] A typical version of the story is given by this quote:
“ In 1946, when Hopper was released from active duty, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she continued her work on the Mark II and Mark III. Operators traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term bug. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book September 9th 1945 [sic]. Stemming from the first bug, today we call errors or glitch's [sic] in a program a bug.[5] ” Hopper was not actually the one who found the insect, as she readily acknowledged. And the date was September 9, but in 1947, not 1945.[6][7] The operators who did find it (including William "Bill" Burke, later of the Naval Weapons Laboratory, Dahlgren Va.),[8] were familiar with the engineering term and, amused, kept the insect with the notation "First actual case of bug being found." Hopper loved to recount the story.[9]
While it is certain that the Mark II operators did not coin the term "bug", it has been suggested that they did coin the related term, "debug". Even this is unlikely, since the Oxford English Dictionary entry for "debug" contains a use of "debugging" in the context of airplane engines in 1945 (see the debugging article for more).
Friend of mine wrote code in Ada (govt contract). His modules worked.
The C-something modules didn't. Moths...
Lady-in-charge 'downsized' him.
He's also still unemployed...
Physics major, U of Ga.
He and I attended same DEC school.
Last edited by chuckr; 10 Aug 2009 at 19:58. Reason: Correct erroreous information
i dont want this topic to drift into a different one...
would you consider Computer Information Systems or IT to be easier than computer programming
Aw, you guys are way too down on programming as a career. It has changed over the last few decades but it is still a strong, vital, high paying career for anyone that is good at solving puzzles.
The offshoring of coding jobs is not as bad as people say. Most every case, I've personally seen has come back to bite the PHBs hard and domestic coders were needed to clean up the mess.
I've personally worked for an asian company twice because decent coders are still not to be found over there in any great number. Offshore companies that CARE about the code they produce actually come to the US to get it done. It could be another few decades before anything significant changes there.
Today there are also a lot more specialties to get into with varying levels of technicality and creativity. Embedded systems and of course network coding are two of the biggest general fields going today. But gaming and other entertainment fields are also HUGE for coders, custom code is required all the time.
I've been a software engineer/programmer professionally for 25 years and most of the people I know are too and things are more vibrant today than ever. Even in this horrible economic turn down the emloyment rate is not so bad.
Maybe I've just been lucky or maybe I'm some kind of brilliant mind, but probably neither. If you think you have a propensity for it and if coding excites you (I still get a giddy feeling when coding up something cool after over 30 years of doing it) then it is a great field to get into.
It's a tough call because there are so many people who can do the job and it also pays pretty poorly because of that fact.
I guess my experience has been that programming is over saturated and low paying and since it's a pain to do it really makes no sense to pursue a career in programming. It would be difficult to reach the top where you might make a half decent wage.
I took networking which was a nightmare but pays twice that of programming in this area. Still not the greatest choice and I plan to go back and take something different.
The 6502 from MOS Technology (created by some ex-engineers from Motorola who later sued them and won) has two cycles : fetch & execute.
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