On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 8:02 AM, Tim Delaney <timothy.c.dela...@gmail.com> wrote: > I received a copy of "The Beginners Computer Handbook: Understanding & > programming the micro" (Judy Tatchell and Bill Bennet, edited by Lisa Watts > - ISBN 0860206947) for Christmas of 1985 (I think - I would have been 11 > years old). As you may be able to tell from that detail, I have it sitting > in front of me right now - other books have come and gone, but I've kept > that one with me. It appears to have been published elsewhere under a > slightly different name with a very different (and much more boring) cover - > I can't find any links to my edition.
Heh. I wonder if I could still find back the copy of "Bible BASIC" that I learned from. And yes, I learned BASIC first. Moved on from there to 8086 assembly language, using DEBUG.EXE as my assembler, and proceeded through a variety of setups with crazy restrictions on them. Let's see... I wrote non-TSR interrupt handlers that executed a subprocess and cleaned up when that process finished; used BASIC with CALL ABSOLUTE to handle a mouse pointer; got onto OS/2 but didn't have a C compiler, ergo wrote OS/2 code in Pascal; wanted to write a device driver but lacked both C compiler and assembler, ergo wrote a two-pass assembler in REXX that piped everything through DEBUG.EXE running in a virtual 86 session; couldn't get hold of a copy of the no-longer-supported VX-REXX, and so wielded a demo version with a weird system of creating executables... you know, getting onto a Linux system with a real toolchain was quite the luxury. (Okay, okay, I did have some slightly more normal experiences in amongst the weird ones. But it sounds more insane to pretend that the above was how _all_ my programming went.) ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
