Author: Roger Munford Date: To: Hampshire LUG Discussion List Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Whatever happened to programming? (O.T?)
Ian Park wrote: > Lisi wrote:
>
>> On Sunday 21 March 2010 21:16:30 Chris. Aubrey-Smith wrote:
>>
>>> Rather making a
>>> plea for a return to the principle of simplicity, which I was taught was
>>> the essence of good programming.
>>>
>> We had to keep it taut and simple - we had so little memory available.
>> Elegance wasn't purely for elegance's sake: it was a necessity!!
>>
>> Lisi
>>
>>
> <brag>
> How about a telephone switching system (PABX) supporting 120 extensions
> + 24 exchange lines, with the complete control program consisting of
> 128KB of code running on an 8085 - the OS (which I looked after) was 6KB
> of hand-crafted assembly language code...
> </brag>
>
> Ian
> 128KB! You were lucky
When I was a lad we were so poor we couldn't afford them fancy UARTs to
go with our 2 Mhz Z80s so we had to make our own using a spare bit on a
LS378 latch for output and a spare LS244 driver bit for input. Course we
couldn't afford fancy things like counters and interrupt controllers
either so we had to make do with counting machine cycles and adding NOPs
so that every possible execution path was exactly the length of one
serial bit.
And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't
believe you.
This was immensely satisfying to get going especially because it meant
that I was able to remove huge chips from the PCB layout which meant
pulling off yards of blue and red sticky tape from the photo mask and
reduce the size of the power supply. Each subsequent Z80 card that we
produced had a connector for a terminal which we used for testing the
hardware. It would have been nice to say that the company saved millions
but, sadly, it was a micro company and the savings were in the order of
a few thousand but appreciated all the same.
However it does illustrate a certain sadness of a life in technology.
Any really good idea that you have will always be eventually binned and
no trace will be left. I have a friend who is a 3rd generation builder
in a small Dorset town. He designs and builds really attractive
buildings and walking through town you can see examples of his, his
father's and his grandfather's work all still much admired and enjoyed.
However elegant a piece of code you may write it will one day be deleted.
These days, more often than not, a programmer spends his/her time
pulling together various modules to achieve something and when there is
an obscure problem with one of these modules - generally , instead of
looking through the code you have to search the net or spend time on the
telephone trying to get technical help to take you seriously because you
are the first person in the world to have this bug and it is hard to
recreate. You spend your time figuring out how the modules are likely to
work to try and come up with a work around to avoid the circumstances
that cause the problem.
