Dad Hacker

I've done several embedded projects in the past 5-10 years years. Mostly it's a matter of writing just enough assembly to get things running, and flipping into C when humanly possible because life is short.

Talk to old video game veterans [waves]. We wrote tons of assembly because there wasn't much choice. But these were largely 8-bit processors, the compilers weren't any good and the code space was constrained. But I was talking with a guy recently who said he'd written hundreds of thousands of lines of 68K assembly, and I have no idea why you would do that because 68K C compilers, Pascal compilers, anything compilers were pretty good even back in the benighted 80s. Well, better than assembly.

Of course, once you flip into C you're still not in an environment where you have much of a runtime (I kept having to explain to a contractor why he couldn't do heap operations in an early boot phase, much less expect the results to be addressable later).

Even in a very code-space sensitive project, I started off with a tiny bit of assembly, then made everything more or less functional in C, then went back and hand-coded routines as we needed to get bytes back: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1911

My level of fascination with an architecture can be dramatically by the quality of the available tooling. If there's nothing then that's fine, green fields are great fun. But if the tooling sucks (TI and your DSP software, I'm looking at you) or is horridly expensive, then I'm usually…

For those unfamiliar, this is a full open source (GPL) re-implementation of the original Atari ST (16/32 68000 system) operating system. Here's the long form:

The Atari ST's operating system ("TOS") was forked from Digital Research's 'GEMDOS' (a kind of CP/M 68k / MS-DOS alike disk operating system) along with 'GEM' (Graphic Environment Manager) which consisted of a device-independent graphics subsystem ('VDI') and a windowing system / application toolkit ('AES' application environment services). Atari was given a license from DR back in 1984, and effectively did their own port and forked from the mainline. The story of how that all went down is chronicled in an excellent series of blog posts by an original participant here: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=995 and http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1000

Note that this is 'Atari Corp', which was a company owned by Jack Tramiel after he quit Commodore. Not Atari Inc, which was the company responsible for Pong, the Atari 2600, and the original Atari 8-bit computers.

GEM was the brainchild of Lee Jay Lorenzen, who had worked on the Xerox Star project and who had advocated at Xerox for getting some of those concepts onto lower end PC-class machines. He joined DR in the early 80s and headed up the GEM project to work on that. He later left DR to start Ventura Publisher, an excellent DTP package which was built on GEM.

Digital Research went on to develop GEM on the x86 on a separate branch from the Atari version. They were…

> There just isn't anything on the web that compares. (or if there is, please please tell me!)

The breadth and depth of well-written technical information available on the web is far, far beyond what was available in Byte in its heyday. Consider:

http://lwn.net/Articles/428530/bigpage
http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/category/programming
http://hackermonthly.com/issue-10.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/
http://prog21.dadgum.com/
http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/
http://diveintomark.org/
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
http://www.facebook.com/Engineering
http://research.google.com/video.html
http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/
http://www.exampler.com/blog/

The big difficulty these days is not getting access to well-written, broad-ranging tech material; it's choosing which well-written, broad-ranging tech material you want to read out of all the immense quantity of material out there, and avoiding spending all of your time reading it. Services like HN, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, Delicious, and Slashdot basically exist to solve this filtering problem (although not, obviously, limited to the tech press).

> What gets funded on the web isn't determined by what users want - it's what advertisers will pay for.

That's true, but fortunately it's irrelevant, because what gets written about on the web isn't determined by what gets funded—it's what people want to write about.

Here's the announcement blog post for the containing project:

> http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=2106

The license author goes into the reason for the license and his thoughts on RMS in a comment on that blog post:

> It’s not about hating free software. I’m a believer in that; I released my first game for free in 1982. Note that the github thing I put up is essentially totally free (something I would have been restricted from doing, by my employer, up to a year ago).

> I have a personal dislike for RMS and I think that his philosophy of economy is at best naïve and dangerously unworkable. 25 years ago he was exhorting me to quit my job in protest to support some of his politics and he wasn’t pleasant about it. Thus, ABRMS.

> If RMS really wants a miserable little 6502 assembler I can always amend the license. I’m not unreasonable. But he has to ask. :-)

I've since also found a comment on an interesting blog post in which one of the original designers is quoted in saying that virtual memory was not a consideration for the 68000 initially: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1383

Though qualified with "until the design was almost complete", making the answer to my question (as often) much more fuzzier than I thought.

And another commenter speculates it was Apollo with the two-68k implementation, but without sources and the commenter is unsure of it themselves.

In any case, very interesting stuff.

EDIT: Someone else claims it was Masscomp: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1383#comment-3582

>It’s not about hating free software. I’m a believer in that; I released my first game for free in 1982. Note that the github thing I put up is essentially totally free (something I would have been restricted from doing, by my employer, up to a year ago).

I have a personal dislike for RMS and I think that his philosophy of economy is at best naïve and dangerously unworkable. 25 years ago he was exhorting me to quit my job in protest to support some of his politics and he wasn’t pleasant about it. Thus, ABRMS.

from http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=2106. via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6822190