manny (13 мая 2013 - 06:54) писал:
Вот история про выживание...
Я уже рассказывал, что у меня есть друг по имени Albert Rich.
Обычно я называю его ADR, потому что его полное имя: Albert D. Rich.
А вот рассказ, написанный другом моего друга по имени Paul:
The flight was uneventful up until the plane’s final descent, when it hit me that we’d forgotten something: a bootstrap loader, the small sequence of instructions to tell the Altair how to read the BASIC interpreter and then stick it into memory. A loader was a necessity for microprocessors in the pre-ROM era. Without one, that yellow tape in my briefcase would be worthless. I felt like an idiot for not thinking of it at Aiken, where I could have coded it without rushing and simulated and debugged it on the PDP-10.
Now time was short. Minutes before landing, I grabbed a steno pad and began scribbling the loader code in machine language— no labels, no symbols, just a series of three-digit numbers in octal (base 8), the lingua franca for Intel’s chips. Each number represented one byte, a single instruction for the 8080, and I knew most of them by heart. “Hand assembly” is a famously laborious process, even in small quantities. I finished the program in twenty-one bytes— not my most concise work, but I was too rushed to strive for elegance.
I came out of the terminal sweating and dressed in my professional best, a tan Ultrasuede jacket and tie. Ed Roberts was supposed to pick me up, so I stood there for ten minutes looking for someone in a business suit. Not far down the entryway to the air-port, a pickup truck pulled up and a big, burly, jowly guy— six foot four, maybe 280 pounds— climbed out. He had on jeans and a short-sleeve shirt with a string tie, the first one I’d seen outside of a Western. He came up to me and in a booming Southern accent asked, “Are you Paul Allen?” His wavy black hair was receding at the front.