
No luxuries when programming an IBM 5150 PC (video) - joshwa
http://www.vimeo.com/820290
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nickb
Jim Leonard = Trixter... one of the originators of North American demoscene. I
met him in 1998/1999... he's a great guy. Glad to see him still plugging away
at cataloging old hardware.

In that video he's debugging a simple mod tracker... a program that allows you
to compose music by adding various samples/notes/effects to a track. Tracker
allowed you to create great sounding music (for that time anyway) in a small
space and one that was using a small memory footprint. You could forget about
decoding MP3s (they weren't even invented then but) since the CPU was nowhere
near fast enough to decode the stream. Once you had a mod file, you could
synch it to your graphics and play it back together in a demo.

Ah, those were fun times!

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mynameishere
Not sure that's the best example. Try interfacing with a computer thus:

[http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_141505.ht...](http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_141505.html)

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allenbrunson
that's turbo pascal! not long after that one, borland produced a similar ide
for the C language, and later, C++. and that's how and when i started
programming.

~~~
noonespecial
That turbo pascal IDE is how I started programming as well. I had dabbled in
basic on c-64 before that but the limitations were too confining. Back then,
it felt like pascal could do anything!

I actually had a serious nostalgic moment watching him page up and down and
wait for the refreshes. I miss the feeling of endless possibility that blue
cga screen imparted...

~~~
SwellJoe
I was the opposite. I had written quite a bit of BASIC and a tiny bit of
assembly on my C-64 and then a C-128, but when I got Turbo Pascal on my dads
PC I was utterly thwarted in my attempts at building something. A few years
later I was able to breeze through the AP computer programming course in high
school, which used Pascal on Apple IIe systems, but I was never able to do
anything useful with Pascal. I started making progress again on my Amiga with
ARexx, C (using Matt Dillon's DICE environment, which was very UNIX-y), and
Amiga E. I think OOP concepts just threw me.

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comatose_kid
The same guy also wrote code on the 5150 to do video:

<http://www.oldskool.org/pc/8088_Corruption>

~~~
phaedrus
I thought he seemed familiar.

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edw519
I love history and I love computers, but combining them? Ewww. Glad those days
are gone.

</removes floppy 5.25 disk from Kaypro II>

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brk
Yeah, that era was pretty rough. But when Desqview 386 came along, things
really took off :)

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henning
Some people like Lisp machines. Others like the original Nintendo.

This guy is just a masochist.

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redorb
guess Im young at 24, my first programming was with quick basic

