[REBOL] Re: Hunt the Wumpus - or - Call Me Sentimental
From: media:quazart at: 23-Oct-2001 12:40
Ok since you guys are at it... ;-)
Remember the vic-20 or the tandy TRS-80 color computer !? those were the
most fun computers to program... (it might help that I was around 10 years
old at the time ;-)
yep them old tape drives... I remember being all exited when I finally got
myself the computer-controled tape drive! imagine that... how much
technology do you need... the computer can start and stop the (basically a
Hi Fidelity audio) tape recorder, so you don't need to run around the table
to do it yourself... (you still had to rewind it by hand though...I always
found that odd). Computers where so much fun then... hardly anything being
more standard than the fact that the BASIC language having numbers for its
lines... (If I remember correctly, BASIC is the actuall only thing ever
programmed (in part) by Bill Gates himself... everything else ... well you
all know the rest...)
I remember when optimizing code meant to shorten the variable names, because
you needed the few extra 20-100 bytes to finish your code... because there
was not enough of RAM in the system to fit the actual source of the
application within the computer's ram... shorter names also meant
drastically faster code on some platforms... I even remember building
myself a codec which converted string and array data into pictures (using
equivalents of peeks and pokes!) so that I could use the graphics RAM of my
TRS-80 for data. That way I could have more than the (shared) code/data RAM
limit (If I didn't use the graphics rasters, of course!).
ah, well, I have to get back to reality and to REBOL... (I'm currently
building a multi-track timeline for process control.... its quite a challege
trying to weed out View's weird event handling problems)
-Maxim