Bits and Bytes (1983)
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@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Interesting how even back then with very basic computers, they knew that they would one day be an essential part of life.
That gets more and more in the series. It was truly amazing just how much they knew about the future of computing even way back then. And nearly all of the key technology that we still use today was already around then, just expensive or big or slow or whatever.
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@connorsoliver I found it crazy that there was no standardization. Imagine having to have different commands for different computers! We complain now when something comes out on IOS and we have to wait a week for Android and vice versa.
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@connorsoliver I found it crazy that there was no standardization. Imagine having to have different commands for different computers! We complain now when something comes out on IOS and we have to wait a week for Android and vice versa.
Same today, just fewer machines. But Mac, Windows, and Linux all use different commands still today. And Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, BSD all are similar to Linux, but still generally different.
Windows has two different command sets just between the CMD and PowerShell shells, in fact!
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@scottalanmiller so is there any kind of movement toward standardization oris this just the way it is?
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Episode 3 - some questions I have:
Curse keys using shift-I wonder why they didnt use what we have today?
We don't have a stop button to end a loop program so how do we stop it now?
Do people still leave gaps in numbers for programs or can we insert now since we have mouse w cursor ?
Sorry if this looks weird I'm on my phone!
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Episode 3 - some questions I have:
Curse keys using shift-I wonder why they didnt use what we have today?
A lot of old keyboards had no cursor keys, so they had to make a way to move around the screen without them.
We don't have a stop button to end a loop program so how do we stop it now?
Bill Gates answer to that question was reboot (yes, I spent much of my early years in DOS.) The real answer to this question however is, programmers aren't supposed to do something that causes an eternal loop.
Do people still leave gaps in numbers for programs or can we insert now since we have mouse w cursor ?
Manually numbering lines of code just doesn't happen in most programing languages. BASIC was one of the few (that I've used) where this was required.
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@scottalanmiller said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@Scott said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Had a TI 99/4A and an IBM PCjr.
Ha! "Had", past tense. Lame.
Ha! "a", singlular. Lame.
I have three.
Really need to pull them out and try connecting to my 49" LCD TV in the living room. My 13 year old son has never seen what these look like.
I have one of the expansion boxes, complete with the MASSIVE 32k Memory upgrade! Plus dual 5.25" single sided floppies. Not sure if we still have the original TI cassette recorder or not, but hopefully, we at least have the cable.
LOL...weird first post, eh? I've come across this site from time to time, but mostly hang out on that other spicy site. Don't know why I never came here, given my pedigree. These are my Great-Grandparents: http://hatchermangohill.com/About Us.html (John and Pearl, the ones in front of the first Hatcher Mango tree).
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@scottalanmiller so is there any kind of movement toward standardization oris this just the way it is?
Not really, never has been. There is a tiny movement towards it, always, as good products and approaches get identified. When MacOS 9 was replaced with MacOSX in 2000, Mac moved heavily from "totally custom" to "half custom" and half matched to Linux and the rest of the UNIX ecosystem. Windows offers some "UNIX-like" options, that you can add on, Linux can install PowerShell from Windows.
But the underlying tools are different, because the underlying systems work differently.
Think of it like video games. You have different controllers (steering wheel, flight stick, joypad, keyboard/mouse) for different types of games because the games work differently and have different control needs. OSes are the same. What's a really obvious and useful tool on a text based system line Linux is very cumbersome on an API one like Windows and vice versa. The tools actually need to do different tasks, so having a standard tool that does two different things would be potentially more confusing, rather than less.
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
We don't have a stop button to end a loop program so how do we stop it now?
In most OSes... Control-C is the universal "Stop" standard.
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Do people still leave gaps in numbers for programs or can we insert now since we have mouse w cursor ?
Yes, but only if using those ancient languages. No modern language has numbers of that nature, that went away in serious programming around the time of that program and in the PC world by the late 1980s.
BASIC on those cheap 8bit computers had it, but even by the 16bit era with the Commodore Amiga 1000 in 1985, AmigaBASIC had dropped the need for numbers.
I had to still use them when teaching Fortran 77 in 1994, but that was because we used a 1977 version of Fortran instead of the 1992 version that had removed the numbering.
Today, the need for numbers is just a historic novelty and it's pretty hard to even find a way to experience them. Easiest is to fire up a Commodore 64 emulator.
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Curse keys using shift-I wonder why they didnt use what we have today?
Each key cost a bit of money to manufacture back then.
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@CharlesHTN said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
These are my Great-Grandparents: http://hatchermangohill.com/About Us.html (John and Pearl, the ones in front of the first Hatcher Mango tree).
That's awesome!
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@CharlesHTN said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
These are my Great-Grandparents: http://hatchermangohill.com/About Us.html (John and Pearl, the ones in front of the first Hatcher Mango tree).
FFS a space in a URL?
Was it made in Front Page?
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@JaredBusch said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@CharlesHTN said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
These are my Great-Grandparents: http://hatchermangohill.com/About Us.html (John and Pearl, the ones in front of the first Hatcher Mango tree).
FFS a space in a URL?
Was it made in Front Page?
Fuck, it was...
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OMG, Front Page!
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Clickable URL for everyone..
http://hatchermangohill.com/About Us.html -
@JaredBusch said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@JaredBusch said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@CharlesHTN said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
These are my Great-Grandparents: http://hatchermangohill.com/About Us.html (John and Pearl, the ones in front of the first Hatcher Mango tree).
FFS a space in a URL?
Was it made in Front Page?
Fuck, it was...
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Just finished episode 4, and I was wondering who exactly creates the language that the computer can read?
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@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Just finished episode 4, and I was wondering who exactly creates the language that the computer can read?
Anyone, really. You could, if you were bored. The hardware itself has a binary language for the CPU. That's part of the CPU itself. That's "machine language". There is a special language for each CPU called Assembly that's like a "semi-human readable binary equivalent."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language
No one writes in Assembly, because it takes forever to do anything and is super error prone. But the first language for any computer has to be written this way.
Once you have a CPU, then you start by making a compiler. The first compiler has to be written in Assembly OR written on another computer where there are already languages to work with.
Pretty typically, the first language prepared for any computer is going to be C. Just because it is the universal language that everyone uses for everything basic and the moment that you have C working, a million things can be ported in no time to your new computer.
After that, people just make languages as they want.
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In the old days, like in the Commodore 64 days, this was made very confusing because a normal programming language, called BASIC, was often baked into the hardware ROM on the computer so that you could use it even if you had no cassette or floppy containing a new language. So people associate that version of BASIC with that computer, because it is a language that literally everyone with that machine had access to.
BUt that was just one of numerous languages available for it. C, Pascal, Assembly, etc. were all available, just not baked in to the ROM.
