How Going Back To 16 Bit Assembly Is Changing My Web Development

Not my ELF, but similar in that I too had a row of LED’s instead of the “expensive” two digit segmented display. Not only was I unable to source said display in ‘77, the logic to drive it was a waste of time.

For those of you who don’t follow me regularly, I started out coding in machine language. Well, I guess you could call it assembly, excepting the assembler was me. Manually turning the opcode mnemonics into hex, that I’d then enter in binary on the toggle switches of my Cosmac ELF. That knowledge of ‘70’s style coding of RCA 1802 machine language is how I ended up with code in orbit running on SOS. Silicon on sapphire, used instead of normal silicon because it’s radiation resistant..

The past few months I’ve been back to working in assembler (16 bit x86) on a fun little side project. It comes out when it’s ready. No time plan, it’s for fun! Doing so has re-taught me lessons I often complain others never learned, that now I’m realizing I have forgotten! Lessons that made me laugh at how pathetically crippled people are by their over-reliance on tools to do things they should do themselves. And in the process, made everything they do harder to create, harder to work with, and introducing painful overhead in costs.

More so it’s making me review not just the good practices others advocate — which I’m always dissecting anyways — but also those I’ve accepted as fact. This is a good thing, challenging accepted norms is how innovation works.