"Nobody programs in machine language"

From: Tom Hudson <tomhudson_at_execpc.com>
Date: Tue Jun 22 09:03:34 2004

Great story, Nico.

All I can say is, on that project I did that needed all the overlays,
thank heaven for the Corvus hard drive we had! This thing was a $3000,
10MB(!) drive specially set up for the Atari machines. It was
partitioned internally like a bunch of individual floppy disks so the
Atari file system could deal with it, and the interface was via the
joystick ports on the front of the 400/800 machines! Each port had four
bits of data and another line they used for various control, strobing, etc.

Physically, this drive was huge, as you might imagine for a 1984 unit --
And TEN MEGABYTES! Woo hoo! I thought I was king of the world with
that thing. I rigged a special interface for the drive so that up to 8
Atari machines could use it more or less simultaneously.

At least we didn't have to worry about wearing out floppies!

-Tom

Nico de Jong wrote:

>I recognize the situation.
>Back in my Philips (one ell, not two) days, I was working on a 32K (8 bit)
>mini system for local authorities. Everything was devided in 2K/8bit pages.
>The program was so big, that (1) in order to get a 10-20 byte routine, I had
>to split up a procedure in two parts (A and B) , where B could then be
>called from a procedure C. The reason to call B from C, was that I otherwise
>would not have room to end C with a RETURN instruction. Disgusting, but it
>teaches you about effective (in the sens of compact) programming.
>Another project in the system, had been "undersold" by the representative.
>He tought 32K was more then sufficient for RJE, 4-5 tellers, and 1x 3270
>simulation. It wasnt. It ran efficiently on 64K, but the customer didnt want
>to buy 32 more K. The seller didnt want to admit loose of face, so what we
>did, was to implement a disk overlay routine on 8" SSSD floppies. God, it
>stank ! The traffic on the floppy was so intense, that we had to replace the
>floppy at least once a week. Totally worn out. However, the seller was
>happy, as he got his provision from a 32K sale
>
>
>
Received on Tue Jun 22 2004 - 09:03:34 BST