Re: The integral type 'byte' (was Re: Suggested method for returning a string from a C program?)

On 26/03/2025 18:09, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 26.03.2025 17:50, David Brown wrote:

On 26/03/2025 15:08, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 26.03.2025 11:29, David Brown wrote:

>
In the UK at least, home computers were wildly popular from the start of
the 1980's, when they became much cheaper, had usable BASIC languages,
and a wide supply of games.  DOS and CP/M systems were pretty much
business only - home computers hugely outnumbered such systems.
Virtually all home computers were 8-bit - though most users would have
little knowledge of that.

>
I basically agree. Only that those geeks and nerds who privately
bought such computer systems here were mostly informed about the
technical details.

>
That would, I think, apply to the technically-minded adults who bought
early computers themselves - rather than the kids whose parents bought
them.

 Actually, as to my observations, the "parents" were a negligible
community regarding use of computers, it were mostly folks of
ages 16-30 (back these days and in our country). Nerds or geeks,
as to a characterization. The social situation is very different
nowadays.
 

>

>
(Ah, now I remember the system name I forgot in a previous post;
it was a "Schneider" PC with CPM. And some toy called Sinclair ZX
or so.)

>
The Sinclair computers (ZX81, ZX Spectrum) launched a generation of
programmers and technically-minded kids in the UK - it was much more
than a toy.  I learned machine code programming on a Spectrum (along
with a BBC Micro), as well as some Forth, C, Pascal and Logo, in
addition to the built-in BASIC.

 Oh, please, don't get me wrong. Of course you could do a lot of
geeky stuff with those devices and learn a lot about that (then
"new") technology. The "toy" character as I named it I perceived
from the lousy hardware (membrane keyboard, TV as display, etc. -
unless I am confusing things) and also what seems to have been
mostly done with those devices.
 On the minus side, if you wanted to learn about IT or CS - we've

Few played with this stuff because they wanted to learn CS. They wanted to do interesting fun things.
Some commercial products were low quality because they had to be done for a price. I think the ZX80 was £100, at a time when my company produced a business computer, also Z80-based, for £1300. (One client used one of our machines to more easily develop Spectrum programs.)
My own first machine was build from discrete chips, and the software had to be developed from *nothing* (actually, from keying in binary code using home-made switches). There was little scope for niceties.
The first apps with my crude languages revolved around vector graphics, image processing, and frame-grabbing, *after* having to develop the assembler, editor, compiler and libraries needed to make it possible.
That was an incredible learning experience, which helped me get that job with hardware, and formed my attitutes towards traditional tools that everybody is apparently still stuck with.

got a lot of bad paragons from many of these primitive systems;
OSes like DOS,

I had no interest whatsover in operating systems. I did fine without one to start with, while CP/M (our rip-off of it) and DOS provided a file system and a way to launch programs; what else was there?

languages like BASIC

What language would you have advocated that could fit into a few KB, and that could run without a proper file system?

, primitive CPU architectures,

8-bit architectures were fine, just a bit short of registers and with limitation instruction sets. But that is to be expected with only 27,000 transistors on a chip or whatever it was for Z80.
(BTW, have a go at emulating such a processor in sofware; tell me in 3 months how you got on.)
But also at that time - early 80s when Spectrums etc were popular - there were some wonderful new 16/32-bit processors such as 68000, Z8000/0 and NS32032, of which only the first survived.
Their architecture is not that different from current machines.

(YMMV)

Yeah.