Well *we* had it *tough*

[Xyzzy]

…Grumble, grumble, bitch, piss, moan…

<gw>You have a compiler? Why, back in the day, we used machine code!</gw>

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

<gw>You have a compiler? Why, back in the day, we used machine code!</gw>

Oh yeah? Well back at my first job, we not only had to use machine code, we had to write it all in *binary*.

[Jeff Gilchrist]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Oh yeah? Well back at my first job, we not only had to use machine code, we had to write it all in *binary*.

I had a prof in undergrad who made us write IBM mainframe assembly code in binary. It is pretty scary how you get to recognize blocks of binary data and say, "Oh yeah, that does X and this line does Y". I think I had multiple nightmares that semesters that involved 1's and 0's...

[retina]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Oh yeah? Well back at my first job, we not only had to use machine code, we had to write it all in *binary*.

And you try and tell the young people of today that - they won't believe you.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Oh yeah? Well back at my first job, we not only had to use machine code, we had to write it all in *binary*.

Yeah, but you probably had some input device other than sense switches, which were all we had for loading the program to vacuum-tube memory.

[TimSorbet]

Oh yeah? I still don't have a computer! I just hook the phone line to my brain and feel the electricity, then make tones in my phone to type and send other inputs! And I can get faster connections than most people with dial-up!

[xilman]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Oh yeah? Well back at my first job, we not only had to use machine code, we had to write it all in *binary*.

Machine code? My first full time job was writing microcode.

About a year before I went full time, I wrote a microassembler to generate the binary.

The youngsters today have it soft.


Paul

The above is the unvarnished truth. It's not a variant on the 4 Yorkshiremen sketch.

[fivemack]

I remember several months spent checking whether a particularly baroque embedded system was properly implemented, by writing my own simulators of the things that it was supposed to be communicating with; I ended up able to read text from hex dumps at several words a minute ...

[cheesehead]

Once again, contemplating new-fangled hardware advances leads old-timers to wax nostalgic. (BTW, just heard on radio that "nostalgia" comes from a Greek word meaning "homecoming".)

Just for the record -- my preceding post has an exaggeration: I never actually touched the sense switches on the only vacuum-tube computer I've ever used; it had a card reader.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by xilman

Machine code? My first full time job was writing microcode.

About a year before I went full time, I wrote a microassembler to generate the binary.

The youngsters today have it soft.

Now, see, if it was the 4 Yorkies havin' this discussion, it would continue much like a classic series of Dilbert strips (which was the reference I was hoping one of my fellow geeks around here would pick up on):

A: Back at my first job, we had to write everything in machine code - in binary, mind you.

B: Well back when I was a wee lad of an intern, I had to write my own microassembler to generate the binary.

C: You think that's tough? I'll bet they at least let you use both 0s *and* 1s ... all we had to work with were the 0s.

D: You had 0s? We had to work with Os.

[markr]

Or there's this one: http://xkcd.com/378/