LOCS: Language developed at age 9 in Z80 machine code (1988) | Hacker News Reader

LOCS: Language developed at age 9 in Z80 machine code (1988)

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81 pointsnanochess21 comments

Neat, I built one language when I was 12 or so, it was a ripoff of basic (and it was written in basic).

Parsing was hard, so commands were a single letter. The cool thing about it was that it supported windows and multi tasking (but no synchronization primitives).

It was rough and incomplete, but I always remember the moment I realized I could run one statement of each task to run more than one at the same time. I can still picture the first time I run two programs side by side in two windows.

Literature and information was scarce when I was a kid, so it was a true discovery (all my programming resources were basically the C64 manual). I could never get my hands on any lower level programming resources, many things I just found out by literally POKE-ing around the memory of the C64.

I still have a tape with the last version of it lying around somewhere, I called it LSP (Lenguaje Simplificado de Programación), not sure if it's still readable though.

> (all my programming resources were basically the C64 manual)

Real talk though, those Commodore manuals were AWESOME because of how comprehensive they were. Even the 1541 Disk Drive had a complete manual on how to use it's features from Basic. And if you got ahold of the Programmer's Reference, you were golden: https://archive.org/details/c64-programmer-ref

"but it wasn't so good for teaching programming because no home computer came with Logo, it was expensive"

1. My 8bit Amstrad CPC464 (1984) with disc drive came with LOGO [0]

2. I've used LOGO to teach programming (and C, Python, Java) and LOGO is easily the best (Scratch).

[0] https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/System_Disk#CPC464_.28DDI-1...

https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Dr._Logo

Cool! I've added a mention of this to the article.

Cool!

This is what I mean when I say that the older generation knew their computers. Middle schoolers writing assembly was not extraordinary.

Yes it was, though.

As a middle schooler blindly copypasting assembly to make the mouse work in my Turbo Pascal programs, can confirm that this was extremely rare in the mid 90’s. Just having a computer at home was rare enough, the fact that you were into programming? There were like 5 of us seriously into it in the whole school of about 1000 pupils.

Even now there are only about 27 million professional software engineers[1] in the world. That’s 0.3% of the population. Looking at USA alone, 1.4% of the population are software engineers. We are extremely rare.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...

I think it was more common in the 1980s for amateur programmers (including young people as I was then) to know assembly than it was in the 1990s and later for several reasons. First of all there was the need for it -- while there were compilers you could run on 8-bits, the limited memory space meant that the compiler often ended up taking too much of the memory you needed for your program, and so when people realized that BASIC was too slow/limited for what they wanted to write, assembly language was the obvious alternative. Secondly, the assembly languages of 8-bits was generally 6502 or Z80. These are relatively simple processors and learning these architectures (as I did myself) wasn't that hard. Once x86 machines took over in the 1990s, assembly because less attractive both because compilers were more practical because of larger memory and because x86 assembly is frankly a nightmare.

Also for Z80 you could translate the assembly code into machine code by hand quite easily. With 8086, not so much.

Uncommon, but not extraordinary. I did it. Only one or two others at my school were familiar with asm, but I came from a very small town (the single integrated middle and high school was 800 pupils)

Typing in listings from magazines every month and then debugging stuff that didn't work to figure out if I mistyped it or if the magazine made a mistake was such a fantastic learning experience!

Child of the 80s here. I won a couple of those back when. I got one published by Nibble magazine (Apple ][+ assembly) and one in BASIC got me a free disk at Beagle Bros. I loved 6502 assembly language.

Your comment was a fun trip down memory lane. I'd read Nibble cover to cover, and especially scrutinize Beagle Bros advertisements because of the little one liner programs they'd often include. Good times!

Beagle Bros!!! Thanks for that reminder.

Well, depending on which population of middle schoolers you base on. The whole population? Yes it was extraordinary. The ones owning a micro-computer? There it was more common indeed.

I had a VIC20 and at 12 wrote an Asteroids clone - that’s how I realized what a game loop was. And also that I didn’t know how to write one in BASIC.

But drawing those sprites on graph paper was hours of fun.

When I was that age I tried to copy games; first in Basic and then in hybrid Basic/ASM (data 3e,00,cd,...; I never actually used an assembler). Like the OP, also on a MSX. I wanted to know how they worked ; I always found it boring playing them (still find it boring), but how they work under the hood always was interesting to me. It's also how I learned about hardware; I wanted to expand my machine so started meeting up with (to me extremely old) guys who knew how everything worked. The MSX I had came with schematics in the box, so that was fun.

Can this be run on ti calc I wonder ?

In theory it might, but connecting a Z80 TI to anything for uploading the binary is probably super weird and expensive. Does anyone know the executable format to begin with?

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