It brings back memories for me too. This compiler was my first introduction to C, before that I'd used Pascal or Fortran. I worked on Z80 but we also had a 68K project which ran Whitesmith's Idris UNIX clone before we got real System III ported
I'm slightly surprised that no one has suggested PDP-11 assembler as a good starting point if you're not going to learn a current instruction set. Perhaps it's because it was the first one I learnt properly but all the early miccroprocessors felt like a step backwards. I did spend a few years writing Z80 assembler but I wouldn't recommend it nowadays as it's not a very orthogonal instruction set and 6502 doesn't have enough registers to give you a proper feel for writing assembler.
Lost Realms by Thomas Williams is another good book about this period. Rather than Wessex, Mercia etc. it focusses on some of the lesser known kingdoms of that era.
I have a small collection of programming cards from the 70s & 80s. The most amusing one is the VAX-11, which is actually a booklet with 6 pages of instructions plus another whole page of addressing modes. Thankfully I never had to do any VAX assembly programming.
I agree with you. I've also found that themore modern a bike is the more difficult it is to maintain
Take hydraulic disc brakes for example, when they work they are great but when they fail they don't work at all. You then have to bleed them which is fiddly, messy and requires special tools then you'll probably have to do it all over again after a few rides. Tubeless tyres are similar.
The Z80 has lasted a few years longer than me in the computer industry. It came onto the market more or less when I left uni and I retired 2 years ago. For several years in the 1980s I worked on Z80 based terminals and CP/M microcomputers. Most of that work was in assembler but I never really liked the Z80 architecture as I'd been spoilt by the orthogonal instruction set of the PDP-11.
I did a lot of work for both Hitachi and Renesas over the years and used SH-1, 2, 3 and 4 with various OSes. I liked the SH architecture, I first learnt assembly programming on PDP-11s and SH felt like an extended RISCified PDP-11.
Music (guitar, mandolin, synths), photography (film and digital), cycling, running, gardening, archaeology, cooking, church bell ringing. I'm retired so I have plenty of time for hobbies.
Yes, I've rung about 20 peals most of them taking over 3 hours. Physically it's not that difficult but it is a mental challenge as you can't let your mind wander otherwise you will go wrong and the whole sequence of 5000+ changes (combinations) will be terminated prematurely.
I remember reading about Matchbox Game-Learning Machines in a book in my school library in the late 1960s. It was partly responsible for getting me interested in computers.
The 1906A at Oxford in the early 1970s was one of the first computers I used, I was 16 or 17 years old and at school in Oxford. I'm sure this was partly responsible for my subsequent computing career.
As far as I know the UK is the only place that has special varieties of apple for cooking. Cooking apples are usually large, tart and cook to a pulp. There are many varieties but Bramley is by far the most common.
At one place I worked at back in the 1970s there was a speaker on the mainframe (it may have just been a transistor radio picking up interference) and you could get some idea of what the machine was doing from the sound.
I also remember when compilers made more of an effort to fix trivial errors. It was worth it when using a batch system and you could only run a few compilations each day.
All4 has always worked fine for me, I find Channel 5 the least reliable of UK TV channels for streaming. Having said that, I usually record interesting Channel 4 programmes so I can skip the ads!