18 Nov
2021
18 Nov
'21
7:29 p.m.
On Nov 18, 2021, at 1:19 PM, Thomas DeBellis
<tommytimesharing at gmail.com> wrote:
My wife is a college professor (definitely smarter than me) and has a tutoring business
on the side. Some of the kiddies are indeed idiots, but as they typically never want to
pay for anything, we don't do business with them (and for other reasons).
Some of them are simply misinformed or uninformed. Among other things, I tutor shell
scripting.
? You should see the lightbulb go off when they realize what they've been missing
? I get paid either way
Not a bad gig.
A real treat is when I get to tutor assembler. It doesn't get any better than that,
but it's only once or twice a year!
Assembly is fun, and useful.
I've learned the assembly language of quite a lot of machines. The strangest, by far,
is of the Electrologica X1 machine. It's only barely an assembler, really -- more
than machine language but not by much. Then again, the assembler is only a bit over 100
instructions long (it's part of the ROM BIOS of the machine). You can see the full
BIOS listing in the back of E.W. Dijkstra's Ph.D. thesis, where he worked out how to
deal with a machine that uses interrupts (that was back in 1958; the X1 was the first
commercial computer with interrupts).
A very small example is here: http://helloworldcollection.de/#Assembler%C2%A0(X1)
paul