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Comment by mkhalil | Hacker News Reader

Cool article. Must of been one hell of an smile on their face every time DOS ran on the machine properly after being assembled on a separate machine.

Q̶u̶e̶u̶e̶ Cue the person looking at source code mentioning something along the lines of "this is real engineering".

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> Queue the person looking at source code mentioning something along the lines of "this is real engineering".

Well it's assembly, so I'm looking at it and thinking, "Yup, that's assembly!"

Operating systems today are still marvelous feats of engineering despite their quirks (such as legacy "features" like ANSI and UCS-2 "Unicode" in Windows), the fact that in the past we could fit an entire operating system AND running applications in one megabyte of RAM is remarkable!

Megabyte? Luxury! Lots of cool systems fit in 64KB, including PDP-11 UNIX.

I thought the PDP-11 had 128k.

You could get a pdp 11s with a range of memory sizes all of the ones I worked on had less than 128k

Like my sibling poster said, a full megabyte would have been the sheerest luxury. After the ROM was mapped into memory on startup, my C64 had 38 kB available for programs. It is flat-out amazing what people did with that memory, including office software, networking and of course games.

Keep in mind that the Apple II originally shipped with 4 kB.

The Sinclair Cambridge ZX-80 (sold here as the Timex computer or somesuch) shipped with 1kB of RAM. That said, it wasn't really usable for much beyond programmable calculator kinds of stuff. With a 16kB expansion it was pretty awesome.

My first computer! I was programming in Z-80 assembler, typing in listings from magazines, with no way to save the code. So once the machine was switched off, the program was wiped and it had to be entered again. It's one way to learn the importance of accuracy - after hours of typing hex digits, to have one type cause the program to blow up, and have to start all over.

I'm gonna' need you to retype this comment from the beginning as there's a typo and thus, I can't read it.

Are you going to blow up as well?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000

My first computer.

As I think back on the hardware, I am amazed that my old C=64 could not only run a word processor, but it could spell check. The machine only had 64 kb of RAM and the disks were so glacial that you couldn't touch them much at all and maintain anything like a usable speed.

My IIGS with a transwarp and a CFL disk boots faster than my win7 4.5Ghz machine with a samsung 850 too...

There are still amazing things being done right now, especially in demoscene.

I especially like this: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=30244 [1]

Everything (including graphics and music) fits in 200kb (177kb exactly)

While it was made almost 10 years ago it is still very impressive.

[1] If you can't or are afraid to run executable (antivirus programs might complain due to compression program they used), here's video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMfyrnu3n_c

I was always amazed by .kkrieger[1]

You get an FPS complete with 3D engine... dynamic lightning IIRC (!), music, textures...

... in 96kb.

Granted, most of it is procedural but still it's a very very impressive piece of code.

I've always thought that demoscene guys were on a whole different engineering league

[1] http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12036

("Queue the person ..." - "Cue")

Updated, thanks.

"Must of" should be "must've".

Today I learned: http://grammarist.com/eggcorns/must-of/#comments

Thanks

> Must of

have

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