I’m a Computer Engineer, or so my degree from +15 years ago says.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve been messing with computers all my life, since I was a little kid.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 When I was around 8 years old I owned my first personal computer, a Sinclair ZX-81.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 That little thing only had 1 KB of RAM though I had the 16 KB RAM extension module, and its CPU, the infamous Z80, worked at 3.25 MHz.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s right, megahertz, not gigahertz like CPUs run at now.<\/p>\n
Can you believe that little CPU, manufactured by Zilog, was the beginning of the personal computer revolution (along with the MOS6502 the Atari 2600 had)?\u00c2\u00a0 The Z80 was based on the Intel 8080 but fixing all its flaws and hence creating a better CPU that domainated the market. All modern personal computers now have CPUs based in the Intel 8086 (thus the name x86), which were based on the Intel 8085, the Intel’s answer to the Z80 copying several things from it.<\/p>\n
Being a kid I learned BASIC to code for the ZX-81 but it was hell slow.\u00c2\u00a0 So I had no option but to learn the Z80’s instruction set and to code directly in it.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 No, there were no assemblers at the time, so you couldn’t assemble human readable code into machine code.\u00c2\u00a0 You had to set the memory manually, byte per byte, and then execute it and wish for the best.<\/p>\n
Eventually I moved on and got a TRS-80 Color Computer.\u00c2\u00a0 It was popularly known as the CoCo, but I’m not sure where, because at the time I’d never heard the terminology.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe because I was only 12 years old and I was definitely not going to the CoCo conferences or whatever they had at that time.<\/p>\n
Same thing happened to me with the CoCo: programs coded in BASIC were too slow.\u00c2\u00a0 So I had to, once again, learn the instruction set of its CPU, a Motorola 6809E.\u00c2\u00a0 This time my brother wrote an assembler for it.\u00c2\u00a0 The most fun that I had with the CoCo was to set it in high resolution mode all the time.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 That means to remap all the interruptions handlers to new functions that draw in the screen.\u00c2\u00a0 Eventually I came up with a modded OS that was in high resolution.\u00c2\u00a0 I even code a font editor so you could create your own fonts to use with the CoCo.<\/p>\n
Around this time one of my brothers got a Commodore C64.\u00c2\u00a0 Now that was something real.\u00c2\u00a0 The C64 had tons of games, and tons of applications.\u00c2\u00a0 Was the most popular computer in the 80s, dominating the market for the entire decade.\u00c2\u00a0 I never coded for the MOS6510 it had, but that computer was fun.\u00c2\u00a0 A funny thing about it is that its disk drive, the Commodore 1541,\u00c2\u00a0 also had a CPU: a MOS6502 that is pretty similar to the MOS6510 the main computer had.\u00c2\u00a0 That much power just to read zeroes and ones on a magnetic surface.<\/p>\n
A couple of years later my oldest brother got a Commodore Amiga.\u00c2\u00a0 That was a computer that was way ahead of its time.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 The Workbench was a very decent graphic-based operating system and it was just great.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 My brothers and I learned how to code in C with that computer, since we had a C compiler called Aztec C.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 I was just 14 years old.<\/p>\n
Fun times.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Computers were only used by people who knew how to code in them.\u00c2\u00a0 Now all the fun is gone and computers are used mostly by people that don’t even know how a computer works, but they just know that they work.<\/p>\n
When I was 15 I got my first x86-based computer: a desktop computer that had an Intel 80286 in it.\u00c2\u00a0 There was no Windows yet, that came like 2 years later.\u00c2\u00a0 It had MS-DOS instead, coded by Bill Gates anyway.<\/p>\n
Fast-forward something around 20 years: I don’t even remember how many CPUs I have coded in assembler to.\u00c2\u00a0 Several Motorola ones (MC68000, MC68328, etc),\u00c2\u00a0 ARM, x86 and x64 CPUs, to name a few.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Also I don’t even remember how many programming languages I have coded at least a decent program in, both compiled (Pascal, Fortran, Modula-2, C, C++, C#, Java…) and interpreted languages (TCL, Perl, Python, PHP…).\u00c2\u00a0 Funny thing: I’m still learning things.\u00c2\u00a0 I guess it will never end, and I’m happy about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m a Computer Engineer, or so my degree from +15 years ago says.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve been messing with computers all my life, since I was a little kid.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 When I was around 8 years old I owned my first personal computer, a Sinclair ZX-81.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 That little thing only had 1 KB of RAM though I had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.thescorpius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.thescorpius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.thescorpius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.thescorpius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.thescorpius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/test.thescorpius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48,"href":"https:\/\/test.thescorpius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/48"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.thescorpius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}