[HN Gopher] Microsoft BASIC for the Dragon 64
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       Microsoft BASIC for the Dragon 64
        
       Author : todsacerdoti
       Score  : 43 points
       Date   : 2023-06-27 22:14 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | Mountain_Skies wrote:
       | >It totals 340 pages of fan-fold tractor feed
       | 
       | No one ever accused assembly of being space efficient when
       | printed out.
        
         | JdeBP wrote:
         | My printout fits in and has sat rolled up in a Furniss of
         | Cornwall biscuit tin for many years. (-:
        
         | lproven wrote:
         | True...
         | 
         | But the thing is, with determination, in 1000 years, that
         | printout might be legible, with great care and delicacy.
         | 
         | Whereas there probably isn't a single digital medium in the
         | world that will be. (All right, punch cards or paper tape, but
         | both require very specific skills, rather than just being able
         | to read an alphabet with your bare eyes.)
         | 
         | Compactness is sometimes overrated.
        
           | pavlov wrote:
           | The wasted horizontal space on assembly printouts isn't
           | really a problem either. After the nuclear apocalypse, when
           | industrial paper is made no more, monks will carefully cut
           | out the assembly code lines and paste them into a vellum-
           | wrapped book while reusing the remaining paper scraps.
           | (They'll also make beautiful ink drawings of dragons in the
           | book margins. "Tome of Dragon64", a mysterious spell book
           | from pre-doom times.)
        
             | lproven wrote:
             | _A Canticle for Mettoy_ sort of thing?
             | 
             | Very nice. I approve.
        
       | Zobat wrote:
       | This was where my programming journey began, this and a "ring-
       | binder-in-a-box" IBM basic programming manual detailing every
       | command.
       | 
       | I have written so many programs on my Dragon 32, line numbers and
       | goto's, oh those were the days (that I don't want to return to
       | even though I just complained about traversing five or six layers
       | in two different projects just to be able to call a stored
       | procedure and return the result).
        
       | JdeBP wrote:
       | The dirty rotten cheats went and took a copy of the source code
       | in Wales. (-:
       | 
       | I had to use a disassembler to get an enormously long printout
       | (on a continuous roll in a really small font -- no fanfold or
       | tractor holes here!), and then go through and hand-annotate it in
       | ball-point pen after figuring out what it did.
       | 
       | Checking the first few hundred lines of my printout, it agrees
       | with this source.
        
       | mikerg87 wrote:
       | Was cool to see that @davePL contributed to this effort. If you
       | dont know he was a MS dev during silver age of MS during the
       | Windows 95->NT-2000-XP era. Its worth following him on twitter
       | and youtube.
        
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       (page generated 2023-06-28 23:03 UTC)