[ubuntu-uk] Anyone here into low-level stuff?

[Andrew Oakley]

James Grabham wrote:
> OK, so a couple of nights ago, someone from my LUG gave me a few old-ish 
> books ('90s), anyway, theres a beginers guide to Assembly Language 
> there.  I started reading, and the first 3 chapters are just about 
> Computer Science, and It's really interesting, Im learning about octal 
> and hex, and other maths stuff as well.  Id always though low-level 
> stuff would be really boring...  guess I was wrong.

I officially retired from machine code when they switched from 8-bit to 
16-bit. With 8-bit, I could actually memorise then entire 6502 
instruction set in my head, by the numbers (eg. 96 = return from 
subroutine). With 16-bit, it was just far too complicated for the whole 
thing to stick in my head in one go!

Low-level stuff is really interesting, but the problem is these days 
everything is built library on top of another (eg. X-Windows, Gnome) 
that it is almost impossible to achieve anything in machine code.

-- 
Andrew Oakley