On an Apple ][, you couldn’t necessarily assume your BASIC code was going to start from the same location, thanks to the LOMEM command. I remember one of the things I wrote back in the day was a relocatable Assembly loader that would allow a bit of assembly code to be loaded to an arbitrary address in available memory and all the internal addresses (for, e.g., JSR or JMP or even some LD* commands, as I recall) would be rewritten to the correct location. I don’t really want to go back to writing code for 8-bit computers, but the challenges were certainly fun.
replyIt always feels a bit like lost magic.
replyI sometimes wonder if there is still a lot of that magic in the tech world, but were so used to having everything abstracted away from us in multiple layers that we've lost the ability to look for it.
I think about the TLA hackers who do seemingly impossible things. Surely they must operate on this level.
Because I started in that era, I sometimes think that’s why I was motivated to learn synthetic programming for the HP 41, write the first disassembler for the HP 48SX’s ROM, why I wrote jailbreak software on the iPhone before the App Store existed. Tiny limited environments most resemble where I first coded.
replyIt certainly tarnishes the shine to have a per-OS-version table of offsets to patch ;(
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