On 2014-03-06 01:24, Mark H. Harris wrote:
On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 6:24:52 PM UTC-6, Dennis Lee Bieber
wrote:
I must have had a deprived life...
The only "debug" on a home system I ever used was the one in
LS-DOS. And even then, it was only because an OS update disk
arrived with a bad sector and could not be copied.
Not many people realized what they had in front of them. The only
reason you might is if you 'grew up' on a system that required
machine coding; like the Wang 700 series, or the MITS Altair 8800,
or the VIC 20 with VicMon.
I grew up with all three. So, before I ever learned a line of BASIC I
was coding machine language (not assembler) on the three platforms
above... the wang used integrated circuits, but had to processor
chip; the MITS used the very first 8080 chip from Intel, and the VIC
20 used the 6502 from Motorola.
The 6502 came from MOS Technology. Motorola made the 6800.
My first personal computer (I did not own it, it was temporarily
loaned to me) was the VIC 20. It only had 5k of memory, so anyone
who did any real programming on it purchased the VicMon cartridge
which was a 'machine language monitor'. It was "DEBUG.COM" for the
VIC 20.
5K? Luxury! I started with the Science of Cambridge Mk14. Including the
RAM on the I/O chip, it had 640 bytes.
When I got the first copy of DOS on floppy and saw DEBUG.COM I knew
instantly what it was... a machine language monitor system for
reading and writing machine code (8086 / 8088) in memory, or to disk
sectors, or to disk as a file-name. It wasn't just a
debugger---hardly! It was (and still is, yes, I still use it) a
simple clean full-blown machine language monitor capable today just
as then, to build sophisticated applications with 1's and 0's/
It was also my cup of tea, as it were. The folks who used the MITS
Altair 8800 hated punching code in by hand; gets old fast. But not
for me. I loved it, because I was as interested in the 8080 processor
as I was in writing programs for it; it was great fun experimenting
with memory and the processor.
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