Who else had a history with microcomputers.

TRS-80, Commodore 64, Dragon32, etc. Any or all of those self contained units with a shit keyboard that ran BASIC and were completely useless and a long drawn out pain in the ass for anything but playing games and text adventures.

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SW-User

✋ but you probably guessed that. What they were great at was teaching young nerdlings about systems architecture because they were so simple and had basically no abstraction layers. It actually helped me that BASIC was worthless, because it forced me to use a machine code monitor to do anything useful, and so I learned about hex and BCD and interrupts and registers and pointers and logic, as well as how to control hardware devices. At least after I got sick and tired of being killed by things in Zork II.

MethDozer · M

@SW-User Exactly. They were so crappy and low functioning it took a lot of thinking.out of the box to get potential.

Funny you mentioned ZORK. I just started playing the first one again on an infocom emulator on an Odroid rig. I rolled three joints, blasted Death in Vegas, and got sucked in till 3am.

SW-User

@MethDozer Honestly, the family 64 was the foundation of my career and the reason I've never worked a crappy job in my life. That knowledge set the stage for understanding things like call stacks and linkers and device drivers and operating systems that came later. I feel kind of bad for The Kids These Days who start out with Python and the like. They can mess around with microcontrollers, but the problem is that they don't have to do everything on them. My options were the 64 or nothing, and that's what forced my nose to the grindstone.

Those Infocom games were HARD, I think I only managed to finish Zork I, II and Planetfall.

MethDozer · M

@SW-User I was having a similar conversation about arduinos
recently. Like I love them and they are great but they simplify so much of the microcontroller process that I kinda notice certain things aren't grasped.