Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Sign extension (SEX instruction!)

We were definitely into SEX in those days.

In the late 1970s I was working at Tymshare, and one of my tasks was maintaining the assembler and linker. (I think this was on the PDP-10 but it could have been another machine.)

We wanted a "weak external" feature, somewhat akin to a "weak reference" in modern languages: instead of failing to build if the external symbol was not defined in another object file, it would link OK but leave a null value that you would check at runtime.

The assembly directive for a regular external was EXTERN. I thought of calling the weak external WEXTERN but that looked silly. So I decided to call them Secondary Externals, with the directive being SEXTERN.

And as far as I know, no one complained!

I just finished a project that introduced features for both signal injection and signal extraction. So now we can enjoy both SIN and SEX, sometimes at the same time.

The 1802 had a SET X REGISTER (SEX) instruction, as well as a GET HIGH (GHI) instruction.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/computeii/issue3/page52.php

John Draper (Cap'n Crunch) once creepily invited a friend of mine (who was a strapping young lad at the time) into the back of a van to "execute some 1802 instructions".

Ah yes, I knew John well in those days. Not nearly as well as he wanted to know me!

We used to drive around in his VW microbus finding interesting payphones. Then when he was learning to program, I visited him once in a while at his place in Berkeley to help him with his code.

My motivation was that he usually had some decent weed. Then one time he asked if I wanted to "work out". That lasted about two minutes until I found out what he really meant.

Many years later, I ran into John at the Homebrew Reunion. He didn't recognize me at first, so I reintroduced myself and mentioned how we used to hang out and write code.

His eyes lit up and he asked, "did we work out?"

https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/10861963196/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com