Disgusted Nostalgia ?

IRC chat this morning, about the old days of computing…


[ silentcoder ] I remember coding a password protection system for msdos 3 on my XT
[ mcnutcase ] Although, scarily, I probably am pretty high on a list of sporkers by age
[ silentcoder ] quite tricky, because I had to disable the Ctrl-Break keystroke (which I had to liearn)
[ silentcoder ] and then I had to hack config.sys so you couldn't bypass autoexec.bat
[ silentcoder ] and finally I built a direq IRQ call into it so if you mistyped the password three times, the machine autorebooted
[ silentcoder ] that was one thing about dos - your software could do bloody anything to the machine you wanted
[ silentcoder ] it was a power, usually abused
[ silentcoder ] on the other hand, you had NO usefull libraries, only 640k of memory (which wasn't a major issue since you could only assing 64k of variables anyway), 320x240 CGA graphics mode and no REAL networking
[ silentcoder ] *assign
[ silentcoder ] oh, and pointers weren't invented yet (though it's debateable whether that was in fact a BAD thing)
[ hobbs ] um, you're kidding right?
[ silentcoder ] hobbs, which bit ?
[ silentcoder ] I know UNIX had pointers back then, dos didn't, and I actually don't think the XT would have been able to assign them anyway
[ silentcoder ] the rest are all just as easilly verifiable fact
[ hobbs ] Pointers were invented long, long before DOS existed. It's just that DOS on a segmented-mode 86 was such a broken system that pointer arithmetic was halfway to impossible
[ silentcoder ] yes, I know, I didn't mean it THAT way
[ silentcoder ] for a generation of programmers who first learned ms-basic and then turbo-pascal on IBM pc's
[ silentcoder ] pointers were invented along with the 386
[ silentcoder ] I mean we used to think it was seriously cool that you could have files of datatype
[ silentcoder ] (serialization wasn't invented yet either... and mind you neither were objects)
[ silentcoder ] structs (records for the pascalians) and ADT's were the state of the art
[ Maximinus ] .match lyrics shite
[ sporksbot ] I don't know anything about lyrics matching shite
[ silentcoder ] I would call it the good old days - except that it wasn't
[ Maximinus ] o/` Your music's shite, it keeps me up all night o/`
[ hobbs ] It was the "man, we were dumb" old days
[ silentcoder ] hobbs, true
[ silentcoder ] but it made us men
[ silentcoder ] in the same way that circumcission does in other cultures
[ silentcoder ] I reckon if more of these youngsters had learned to work with a 64k address space
[ silentcoder ] we'd see a LOT less bloat
[ hobbs ] yabbut. That's not the point anymore. What's better, the inefficient software that you get to use, or the really tight, optimized software that never gets released?
[ silentcoder ] these days that is an abstract question
[ silentcoder ] since both sets are equally unusable
[ silentcoder ] but what grits me is that programmers seem not to even considder basic performance stuff anymore
[ silentcoder ] like using library calls rather than process-launches to do OS work
[ silentcoder ] a process-launch uses way more memory, adds a bunch of disk-activity, creates security holes and is less [tag]portable
[ silentcoder ] a library call (for example to change a file permission) works even if chmod changes it’s options, and is MUCH better on resources
* Astro_g (~Nick@d1244d7e.f0cb11e7.fe68c2e8) has joined #SPORKS
[ silentcoder ] and their reasoning behind a process call: it would take too long to look up the library calls, chmod had a manpage
[ silentcoder ] …
[ hobbs ] obviously someone hasn’t heard of sections 2 and 3 of man


Technorati Tags: msdos, XT, age, config.sys, libraries, UNIX, pointers, serialization, objects, performance, process-launches, OS, security, manpage