What Were the Early Days of PF Like for Members in the Twenty-Year+ Club?

[anorlunda]

Who remembers downloading pictures of pretty girls in ASCII HEX dump format, then using a local utility (???) to turn it into a picture?

 

[DaveC426913]

Who remembers downloading pictures of pretty girls in ASCII HEX dump format, then using a local utility (???) to turn it into a picture?

Man, the internet was the Wild West of FREE girlie pics!

Yep, We were livin' in the future!

 

[Ivan Seeking]

The clip is

I loved that show! LOL!

 

[mathwonk]

i recall writing my first (maybe last) program in machine language for a univac mark I, and joined PF about 40 years later.

 

[Nugatory]

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

while(*s1++ = *s2++);

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.