Text 5596, 49 rader
Skriven 2010-03-04 06:55:02 av Bob Ackley (1:300/3)
   Kommentar till text 5532 av Bo Simonsen (2:236/100.0)
Ärende: Windows Update Fix
==========================
Replying to a message of Bo Simonsen to Bob Ackley:

 BA>> Replying to a message of Bo Simonsen to Michiel van der
 BA>> Vlist: 
 BS>>> I guess the BASIC language was a special dialect? The
 BS>>> problem with assembler is that when you learn it on one
 BS>>> machine it may not be the same on another one (on another
 BS>>> architecture/processor to be more precise)
 BA>> 
 BA>> Assemblers are one step above the actual machine
 BA>> instructions (in fact they *are* the actual machine
 BA>> instructions in human-readable form).

 BS> yes that's right, one line of assembler is equivialent to
 BS> one line of machine code. Writing an assembler is quite
 BS> easy I guess, just translating the instructions to numbers.

 BA>> They are unique for each particular processor (for
 BA>> instance, the 8080 and Z80 chips are architecturally very
 BA>> similar but have different instruction sets - rather, the
 BA>> Z80 can run 8080 instructions but the 8080 will choke on
 BA>> Z80 instructions).

 BS> Right. No offence, but I am a computer scientist so I know
 BS> this stuff.

None taken.  I didn't know your background.  I've been playing with these
things since the early 1970s - and was acquainted with them years before
that.  The first computer I was introduced to was an IBM 1401, back in
about 1966 or 1967; shortly after the introduction it was replaced by a new
IBM 360.

The first computer I actually worked on was a Honeywell H-6000, back
in 1974 or thereabouts.  That thing was the size of about six big
refrigerators and had a whopping one megabyte of memory (the H-6000
was an octal machine and had a hardware limit of 256KB words of
memory - a word was 36 bits in this case, not the usual 32 bits or
4 bytes).  That thing had about fifty remote terminals attached to it,
including 19 off-the-shelf Bunker Ramo BR-90 terminals (the BR-90 is
about 5.5 feet high, 2.5 feet deep and six feet wide, and weighs about
half a ton - and it's a *terminal*), serial numbers 1 through 19.  The
system was known as PACER (Program Assisted Console Evaluation and
Review).  Those BR-90s were sold for scrap for about $5 each back in
the late 1980s, dunno what was used to replace them (I haven't set foot
in the former SAC Headquarters since I walked out of the place at the 
end of September, 1983, and into military retirement).

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 * Origin: Bob's Boneyard, Emerson, Iowa (1:300/3)