Klaus K
Paco HopeOMG. Can you imagine publishing Machine Code for Beginners today??
Mark Shane Hayden@paco I had several of this series they are EXCELLENT every kid should learn how to assemble their code to hex it builds CHARACTER
eestileib (she/hers)
Alfons Klarname 
@eestileib ...and helps learning and practicing debugging a lot!
In my youth I made the experience that almost every code in a magazine had errors. π€¬
Martin Rust
Infinity
muddle@paco "for the z80 and 6502" ... so why isn't the 6502 featured in the code?
(I've said too much)
(I've said too much)
Tor Iver Wilhelmsen
Darth Depro@paco
I'm sure I still have the physical book somewhere. Came with a small booklet with codes. Wonder where in my storage it could be along with my stiffies and floppies with drives that still work.
Be safe
I'm sure I still have the physical book somewhere. Came with a small booklet with codes. Wonder where in my storage it could be along with my stiffies and floppies with drives that still work.
Be safe
Kyle Davis@paco I had that book!
Shane Celis@paco Wow, the PDF is available! For that and many other books in a similar vein. Browsing through Iβm struck by how colorful and inviting it is. Some real care went into this.
VerbGarden@shanecelis @paco The early 80s was truly a golden age for seriously engaging educational books.
Nuclear OatmealThat and some of the other books on that site were nostalgic. Never read then specifically, but yeah, definitely the right time for the time.
Jeff@paco possibly not as charmingly illustrated, but the modern equivalent is the RISC-V ISA Manual: https://docs.riscv.org/reference/isa/_attachments/riscv-unprivileged.pdf
RISC-V was developed as a teaching tool initially, and that's still a part of its purpose and it's reflected in the documentation. It's very approachable.
Daniel Durrans@paco Imagine how many libraries you'd need to pull from npm to get your dev environment set up for this!
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.@paco Those robots "taught" me how to write games for the Apple ][c
Michael T Babcock@paco have you seen the for babies series by Chris Ferrie? Saw him give a talk at the #Toronto science center on #quantum physics and he'd just also written these quantum physics for babies board books as well.
We've been giving them to friends who have babies ever since.
See: https://a.co/d/02pxpg9V
We've been giving them to friends who have babies ever since.
See: https://a.co/d/02pxpg9V
Baby University Complete "for Babies" Board Book Set (Baby University Board Book Sets): Chris Ferrie, whurley, Cara Florance: 9781728232300: Books - Amazon.ca
Baby University Complete "for Babies" Board Book Set (Baby University Board Book Sets): Chris Ferrie, whurley, Cara Florance: 9781728232300: Books - Amazon.ca
DP0@paco Most "coders" these days are even overwhelmed by the "complexity" of low-level programming languages ... and for whom even high level languages are too complex: HELLO VIBE CODING.
Guess which programming languages rank among the top 10 of the most popular languages to "vibe code" in ... Python, JavaScript, and Java ...
Toni Aittoniemi@paco Could you believe we had no problems expecting humans could write machine code, just for fun? π€
Impossible Umbrella 
@gimulnautti @paco It is fun.
Tim Chasesome of us didβ¦ π¬
(and for small, simple architectures, I still find it kinda fun, but amd64 and ARM have gotten too big for me to find them fun/interesting)
glasspshr
Ian Turton@glasspusher @paco I was just thinking that too, not sure if I had this book or another one like it for the zx81 and later the spectrum
Roger Whiteley@paco Kudos to Usborne for making them available, we might run faster computers, but the fundamentals of electronics and making stuff haven't changed AT ALL. You can still buy a 555 timer chip, discrete components, everything. Even a Z80 micro although the original Z80 chips are no longer made.
How to Make Computer Model Controllers is just as relevant today owing to Raspberry Pi's making control computing affordable.
BigLinter
Marcella Francesca 
Spent half my life on a 6502c but nobody wants to hear...
@bitchboss In THIS place? Everyone wants to hear about it!
Walrus π΄σ §σ ’σ ·σ ¬σ ³σ ΏI was living in a Z80 at the time...
Fritz AdalisSymplicity goes a long way...
That was my father's adventure, the Sinclair ZX80. He still has it. He played with it a lot. He taught me how to program. When I was 18, I switched to an Atari 800XL, which I used as my breaker box in the Air Force. The first thing I programmed was a modification to the tape OS using machine code (with a self-written assembler) to increase the baud rate and record/read file name headers on cassette tapes. I mean, 500 baud and not knowing what track is on the tape is bananas...
Steve@bitchboss @paco Time well spent! This little homebrew board and a BBC micro to write code for it saved a very remotely-located experiment I was responsible for when its controller failed. Only made feasible by Sophie Wilsonβs foresight to build a very capable 6502 assembler into the BBCβs Basic environment.
@bitchboss @paco π wouldnβt recommended it unless itβs the only way available!
Wouter Verhelst@paco
Just skimmed through it.
I would have loved a book like that growing up. As it is, some of the stuff covered in it I only learned about when going to college, years later.
I would have been of the right age to get this book! Alas, it doesn't seem to be available in Dutch though. Plus, I only got my first computer (a C-128 hand me down) in the mid 90s... π€·
Just skimmed through it.
I would have loved a book like that growing up. As it is, some of the stuff covered in it I only learned about when going to college, years later.
I would have been of the right age to get this book! Alas, it doesn't seem to be available in Dutch though. Plus, I only got my first computer (a C-128 hand me down) in the mid 90s... π€·
Umur Gedik@paco oh this cover design π
@paco I learnt Z80 assembly code first from instructions seen in listings, and then in Rodnay Zaks "Programming the Z80" book.
By that time we were learning more about thelow level basics, developing was more complex sometimes.
The level of abstraction of today gives a lot of flexibility, but at the same time astrays from the waste of resources: memory space, computing power, energy waste, even for terribly simple applications.
By that time we were learning more about thelow level basics, developing was more complex sometimes.
The level of abstraction of today gives a lot of flexibility, but at the same time astrays from the waste of resources: memory space, computing power, energy waste, even for terribly simple applications.
Gerard van Oel π
@paco
Nice. The closest to the machine programming I ever did was in assembler. Only a very little bit. Around 1987
Nice. The closest to the machine programming I ever did was in assembler. Only a very little bit. Around 1987
RPOM (previously called Magpi) had a series on it, less than a year ago... They'll turn it into a book soon...
Christoff, the human@paco @mainframed767 we need more of this
Marcin CieΕlak
Bert Driehuis@paco when I got my Commodore PET 2001, the previous owner threw in a handwritten disassembly of the entire BASIC ROM. I learned a lot from that, and it kindled my interest in languages.
Unfortunately the 6502 is one of those modern integrated devices, so no peeking under the hood there. But when the PDP8 at school came with full schematics, and the whole thing turned out to be constructed using TTL chips I already knew, that too was weeks of exploration, fun and learning.
LisPi
Green Yes Scotland@paco I remember a textbook called "Fortran for Humans" π
@GreenYesScotland @paco This is how I learned Fortran.
@robinadams Hahaha, that's brilliant! @paco
Simon Zerafa (Status: 
π)There are still one or two brave souls that program in Assembler ππ
@simonzerafa My first, and perhaps most interesting, contribution to open source was assembly.
To play DOOM head to head over a modem, you needed a TSR that ran in DOS and basically translated a modem connection onto a network connection. My uni had these super fast digital modems (115K when the standard was 56K). The DOOM folks open-sourced this little serial adapter thingie. I rewrote some of the main loop in assembly to improve efficiency and emailed the patch.
Frankly, I was a 4th year student who had just taken his first assembly class. Itβs entirely likely that I didnβt improve it much at all.
Codey McCodeface@paco Yes, but every page would start out βAsk your AI Assistant toβ¦β
John Carlsen πΊπΈπ³π±πͺπΊOn the first computer I used with any regularity, I entered machine code via a hex keypad into its RAM--all 256 bytes of it.
That was an RCA COSMAC ELF single-board computer.
I was around 10 years old.
Assemblers and assembly language are luxury in comparison.
@johnlogic you got me beat. My first was a commodore VIC20. 20 Kb of memory. Of which 3600 or so was RAM.
@paco I don't know the VIC-20 that well. I moved up to an Atari 800 when they were sold fully loaded with 48 kiB of RAM. It also included 10 kiB of OS ROM, where 2 k was just the character set bitmaps.