Programming in hex...
... because you had neither the RAM nor the cash for an assembler. See How We Programmed in the Olden Days.

Oh, the joy of it all.
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 14:20, 22 replies)

Anybody who wrote in hex rather than writing their own compiler or as a very minimum knocking up an assembler is a fucking idiot and should have been immediately shown the door.
Ummmm ... no offence like.
( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 14:51, closed)

...on an Amstrad? In Z80 machine code? In 48K? In 1984?
No.

No offense, like.

[Edit - Plus, of course, this is the "things you are nostalgic about that turn out to be crap" QOTW, after all.]
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 17:26, closed)

For god's sake, don't act like you know what you're talking about.
He'll get all cranky and start waving his qualifications about.
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 17:31, closed)

qualifications wang
( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 18:53, closed)

No.
Not Wang. Amstrad.
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 20:35, closed)

I've got my dad's old Wang in the loft. I should chuck it out, but I just can't let go of it.
(Brigadier an old boot sitting on a man's face - forever, Wed 4 Sep 2013, 9:02, closed)

Heh, "Wang"!

( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Wed 4 Sep 2013, 9:29, closed)

Didn't they come bundled with CP/M, which in turn had ASM and later MAC?

( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 18:37, closed)

For god's sake, don't act like you know what you're talking about.

( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 19:15, closed)

No.
They came with a built-in dialect of BASIC and that's your lot.

CP/M? Luxury.
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 20:33, closed)

Yes, ish
The disc drive models (i.e. 664, 6128, or a DDI-1 for the 464) came with CP/M. But that said I don't know anyone who ever used ASM/MAC on a CPC.
(ChaRleyTroniC is invincible with his chips and cheese, Wed 4 Sep 2013, 0:00, closed)

I had the tape version.
I tried to impress my son the other day by telling hinm that in the olden days we used to have to load programs from a tape. His response?

"What's a tape?"

I am old.
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Wed 4 Sep 2013, 9:44, closed)

pshaw ... how dare you expect me to click through a link for context
And the answer is still 'yes'.
( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 18:44, closed)

Meh.
It's just how it were done in them days.

Those were the really great days of programming, where you could whittle your own logic gates from lumps of coal and you could leave your back doors open at all hours of the day and night, and if you coded a bug a copper would give you a clip round the ear and nothing more was said about it, not like today, oh no, all health and safety this and Haskell compiler that, I wouldn't give a tuppeny decoupling capacitor for the lot of them, what do they know, I bet they never had to whittle their own logic gates...
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 20:31, closed)

No. It's how fucking idiots did it in those days.
Which is where we came in.
( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 21:45, closed)

I resemble that remark.
Plus, I dispute your sporting credentials.

Plus, they used to publish hex programs in magazines. Have you never typed in a hex dump from a magazine? No? Then I win.
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Wed 4 Sep 2013, 9:45, closed)

I copied hex from sinclair user like any other nerd my age
That's just a (monumentally daft) way of distributing software. Actually writing the software in raw hex is a completely different thing. For fucking idiots.

And I've written several compilers and I've met Steve Vickers so I think my sporting credentials are OK.
( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Wed 4 Sep 2013, 10:03, closed)

Right, I know this one
Maxam 1.5 FTFW. Best assembler the CPC ever had, unless you asked the French, who all used DAMS. And some people used Roland Waddilove's RAW Assembler, which was a type-in in CWTA, because it was free.

I'm about the only person who still uses hard tabs in any open source project I contribute to, and the sole reason for that is that I learned to program on an Amstrad with 40k space for source code, and a hard tab saved five bytes.
(ChaRleyTroniC is invincible with his chips and cheese, Tue 3 Sep 2013, 23:59, closed)

Nope, I still use tabs
but only because I can't STAND repeatedly pressing the space bar.
( chthonic, Wed 4 Sep 2013, 12:34, closed)

If only every single text editor and IDE of the last twenty years allowed you to insert a configurable number of spaces using the tab key ...

( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Wed 4 Sep 2013, 12:52, closed)

Still easily the best thing I have ever seen on the Internet.
(dchurch bah, Wed 4 Sep 2013, 9:55, closed)

this thread perfectly illustrates why real engineers have so little respect for softies

(alright alright, Wed 4 Sep 2013, 9:03, closed)