News Focus
News Focus
icon url

lostcowboy

07/15/03 6:44 AM

#3929 RE: gotmilk #3927

Hi Doug, Assembly Language, that's one of those high level languages right. lol In my young years I was in the navy, on my first sub we used paper tape. Every time we came up to track a satellite, we would punch out a paper tape of the pass, and I would have to empty the bit bucket! That computer had around 8K of memory. We would collect small programs to run on it. The most amazing program was one that would play a song. Being that the computer did not have a sound card. You had to use a am radio to hear it. I normally did not do programming myself, just repaired it when it broke, but some times you had to make small programs to help find the problem. We programmed in machine code! one's and zero's, we would do register operations like left shift and right shift, ones complement and two's complement. Then there was loop and branch operations. When I got on my second sub, we had a super computer, 32k of ram, and that computer never had to wait on I/O operations, it would use these signals called interrupts to get its attention when a I/O operation was complete. The I/O section was able to put data straight in to memory with out having to go through the computer logic section. One of the interesting things was that it did not have a adder, but a subtractor section, seems that the people that designed it felt that was the faster way to do it.
Here is a web site that tells of my first sub. http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6153/edison.htm
To get a feel of life on a submarine be sure to read some of the tall tales here.
http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6153/610tales.htm and
http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6153/walkers.htm
Be sure that you get your JFK picture!