Member-only story
Programming
Assembly Language Changes Your Brain
Have Brain, Will Travel
When I was still a young pup, a friend and I would challenge each other with machine language programs. One of us would set a task and the winner would be whoever met the challenge in the shortest number of bytes.
If my memory is correct, he won more often than did, but it was fun for both of us.
A one byte program
I did write one piece of code that was the shortest useful program ever. It was exactly one byte.
We both had access to Tandy Model II computers because I worked at a Radio Shack Tandy Computer Center store that sold them and he worked for a programming company that used them. These had Z80A processors, and with the TRSDOS operating system they ran you could just put machine language bytes on disk and run ’em — no headers necessary, like the old DOS “.COM” programs.
TRSDOS was a bit short of “user friendly”. For example, if you wanted to delete a bunch of .DAT files, you’d type “KILL */DAT”. Because the designers of TRSDOS had low expectations for your intelligence, the KILL program would ask you to confirm every single deletion. Every single one.
