- #61
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Who remembers downloading pictures of pretty girls in ASCII HEX dump format, then using a local utility (???) to turn it into a picture?
What Were the Early Days of PF Like for Members in the Twenty-Year+ Club?
- Thread starter Ivan Seeking
- Start date
Click For Summary
Members reflecting on their 20+ years with PF shared nostalgic memories of the early internet, highlighting the excitement of global communication through forums. Many recounted their experiences with outdated technology, such as punch cards and early web browsers like Netscape and Mosaic. The discussions also touched on the evolution of online interactions and the transition from email and Usenet to more modern platforms. Members expressed amazement at how much the internet has changed since they first joined. Overall, the thread captures a sense of camaraderie and shared history among long-time PF members.
- #62
DaveC426913
Gold Member
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Man, the internet was the Wild West of FREE girlie pics!anorlunda said:
Yep, We were livin' in the future!
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- #63
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pinball1970 said:
I loved that show! LOL!
- #64
mathwonk
Science Advisor
Homework Helper
2024 Award
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i recall writing my first (maybe last) program in machine language for a univac mark I, and joined PF about 40 years later.
- #65
Nugatory
Mentor
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The last serious piece of assembler code I wrote was in 1989 or thereabouts... My employer had a successful port of our Unix variant to the Motorola 88100, but to bring it up quickly we wrote strcpy and related functions in C as
and let the compiler take it from there.
Once the system was running I went back, looked at the pipeline structure of the microprocessor, and rewrote the byte copy routines in assembler with unrolled loops and picking up 32-bit words whenever possible (the 64-bit load/store instructions occupied two pipeline stages, so no benefit to using them). Several hundred lines of assembler to replace the single line of C code.... and one of only two times in my life that I coded a performance improvement that everyone could feel as the system booted.
Code:
while(*s1++ = *s2++);Once the system was running I went back, looked at the pipeline structure of the microprocessor, and rewrote the byte copy routines in assembler with unrolled loops and picking up 32-bit words whenever possible (the 64-bit load/store instructions occupied two pipeline stages, so no benefit to using them). Several hundred lines of assembler to replace the single line of C code.... and one of only two times in my life that I coded a performance improvement that everyone could feel as the system booted.