Did you write code for #Psion machines in the #80s and #90s?
We're calling for you to open source your code!
I'm working with a group of enthusiasts, building a library of information about the SIBO/EPOC16 platform. Your old code could give valuable insight, as well as encourage people to write new code.
We're especially interested in old C and #x86#assembly.
Upload it to your public repository of choice, and set it free!
I'm brand new here, so an #introduction is a good idea:
I'm a freelance tech writer / software developer / KM project manager based in Europe. Digitally, I was born in the 90s. So I grew up eating cyberpunk books, BBSs, home computers, hacking, then the first doses of Internet and the Web.
In the 90s and the first 00s I developed my (ahem) "philosophy": digital spaces are (can be, should be) autonomous zones where different cultures, and sub/counter-cultures, can thrive.
These are the years of the enshittification of Internet, but it can't rain forever (cit.) and I see the Fediverse as a new opportunity for some of us to recreate better and safer digital spaces.
That's the "vision". Than there's the daily life: I write code (awful, mostly), help companies in managing their knowledge bases, write technical documentation, sometimes write tech articles for (mostly unknown) business tech manazines.
In the spare time, I tinker with Linux, Risc-V boards and "old" languages like Forth, Assembly and C (but I'm a fan of Haskell too). I'm convinced that permacomputing and, maybe, collapse computing are our digital future. So, "back to basics" seems a good idea.
Am I right in saying that, on every processor in commercial use (i.e. not something an academic has dreamed up to discuss a hypothetical that no one else cares about), ADD is a faster (fewer cycles) operation than DIV?
(I know that a compiler might change a division to MUL, ADD, and some form of shift.)
Browsing through GitHub I discovered an inconspicuous repo that's actually a gem. Z80 Tools is a Z80 Assembly development environment comprising an editor, assembler, debugger, terminal emulator, and other tools.
Here's Z80 Tools running under Crostini Linux on my Chromebox.
This is interesting: a good and extensive ARM Assembly programming tutorial. The architecture and instruction set seem more approchable than I thought for manually writing simple programs, not just for compiler-generated code.
I just started to learn Assembly today.
Yup. hurray me.
It's a very refreshing view on programming after only using high level languages like Python or shell languages.
I kinda want to love this language, but she's making it hard.
Those of you who love #Forth, do you foresee a pathway out of obscurity for the language? In an era where memory safe languages like #Rust dominate, does forth have something to offer?
It used to be that its super power was being "just enough abstraction" atop #assembly language made it the king of flexibility. But in an era where machine language institutions are themselves just really fast macros in a tiny CPU cache, I'm not sure how helpful that is.
In love with the #68k "Address Register Indirect with Postincrement" addressing mode. Yes, I know we have every fancy thing imaginable today, but thinking about it in context, I think it's amazing.
.loop:
move.l (a0)+,(a1)+
dbra d0,.loop
Where d0 contains the number of longwords to copy. Address increment works with words and bytes as well? Love it! #assembly