|
Re: WINDOWS VISTA BETA 2 NOW FREELY AVAILABLE BUT BE WARNED
de Al Klein 06/12/2006 04:22
On Mon, 12 Jun 2006 06:54:34 GMT, usenet@mantra.comEv57o0HA or
www.mantra.com/jai (Dr. Jai Maharaj) wrote:
>Wouldn't it be cool to have a time machine so you could
>go back and grab expert byte-counting assembly
>programmers from the old days and show him this modern
>stuff? Their eyes would roll back in their heads and down
>they would go. I started out with Z80 and 6502 stuff, and
>have even written chained Basic programs to run on a 5K
>Vic-20 with a 3.5K TPA after the OS loaded. "hmmm, I need
>to shave 500 bytes off ... where, how???"
It's called "programming with a shoe horn" :)
But I've written stuff that used more than 64k on Z-80s, 6502s and
6800s (paged a lot of RAM in and out - CP/M BIOS and video all in one
page even) and I've written stuff that ran more efficiently when
modules didn't have to be swapped in and out of a 640k address space,
especially back when 5 meg drives were slow. (Remember the PS-2 and
non-DMA disk transfer that killed the video during disk access? Or
the TVT, that ran the video in software, and stopped video processing
when anything else had to be processed?)