Hacker News Reader

Comment by benlivengood | Hacker News Reader

Do you still write 8086 assembly for fun? I grew up with DOS, a86, and nasm and remember those times fondly. Once I had flat mode in Linux I never really looked back, and once I had x86_64 I never looked back, and now I rarely even delve below the interpreted/compiled level unfortunately. x86 had a closeness to the hardware that was fun to play with.

View on HN

Strangely enough, I haven't written 8086 assembly since 1988, when I wrote the ellipse-drawing code used in Windows.

Pardon my interest, are you happen to be a former Microsoftee?

I was an intern in the summer of 1988. Instead of staying, I went back to grad school which in retrospect probably cost me a fortune :-)

Aaron Giles was just lamenting the other day that the GDI ellipse drawing is apparently slightly lopsided, since he's trying to recreate it :)

https://corteximplant.com/@aaronsgiles/110121906721852861

Hopefully that's not my bug :-) Before my code [1], small ellipses looked terrible: a small circle looked like a stop sign and others looked corrugated.

[1] I can't take much credit. The code was Bresenham's algorithm, as explained to me by the OS/2 group. At the time, OS/2 was the cool operating system that was the wave of the future and Windows was this obscure operating system that nobody cared about. The impression I got was that the OS/2 people didn't really want to waste their time talking to us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com