Are you talking about punch cards like on an IBM 360 using the Hollerith code, or are you talking even older school like back in my telecom career with punch tapes and the Baudot code used in transmitter distributors for teletype operations?
Old-time ping! :)
I’ll read this just before bedtime to help me sleep.
J/k
I started with a Commodore 64.
That directory listing at the end looks like *nix, not DOS. “ls -FAC”, I believe.
I wrote a few low level hardware programs using debug, mostly for I/O interfaces. Remember Borland Turbo Assembler?
Those were the days!
We used to ‘joke’ about a ‘gigabyte of EXPANDED MEMORY and a One Gigabyte Hard Drive as being the ultimate machine!
Windows was a ‘novel’ concept, Version 3.1.
DOS was where the REAL computer guys worked!
I even had some experience with a precursor to MS-DOS, called CP/M......................
Been there did that. A good era, much enjoyed, with good riddance.
Spent much time perusing the BIOS source code for graphics calls. If I wanted a game, I wrote it.
beep.com was awesome !!
“In some of these periodicals, you’d sometimes have little programs printed that you could, if you were careful and didn’t make any mistakes, enter into an editor on your computer, save, compile and execute”
LOL! Yes!
Astronomy Magazine used to print out programs in BASIC like that every month. I did one in QBASIC that was an orbital simulator that took forever to do, and the debugging was just as long because there was always some command that didnt work with what you were programming with, but to run that and watch it go after you fixed it? That was art right there.
I found a bug in BEEP.COM.
Beeps were actually a series of clicks that you could program to make wierd sounds.
In order to get Aces over the Pacific (a DOS game) to run on my windows 3.1 386, I had to boot as DOS and then become a bit of a memory expert. I shifted all sorts of stuff to something called himem and other stuff. It needed around 580k of memory to run and the machine only had 640k or something like that.
Sure was a fun game, once I got it going.
Hard drive? You must be a young pup.
I used SSDD 5.25 inch floppies. Just line up the index hole with the hole in the cover, and you could safely store them by thumb tacking them to your cork board.
And my father was backing up to his audio cassette drive.
Yep. PC Write in MS-DOS was uptown. After that, the military went to Enable, a sucky DOS based suite.
Before that, Commodore 64 with no hard drive, just a floppy. Hundreds of lines of code that had to be typed in letter perfect from Commodore 64 magazine in order to play Choplifter.
And does anyone remember 1dir+? I loved that program. Used it for years.
I’m probably a newbie to talk MacPlus circa 86, IIRC. My son was a good artist in HS. He started on MacPaint. I nought Aldus (?) PageMaker and he did many things for the school. Then adobe Illustrator. He’ll be 47 this year and manages a supermarket chain marketing department. He still uses Illustrator 100.2 or some such version. All from drawing spiderman on MacPaint.
pfftt. I was writing code in the late 70s. Much like you, I also used programs printed in magazines.