FreeAssembly

75 readers

6 users here now

this is FreeAssembly, a non-toxic design, programming, and art collective. post your share-alike (CC SA, GPL, BSD, or similar) projects here! collaboration is welcome, and mutual education is too.

in brief, this community is the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. read this article for a solid summary of why having a less toxic collaborative community is important from a technical standpoint in addition to a social one.

some posting guidelines apply in addition to the typical awful.systems stuff:

all types of passion projects and contributions are welcome, including and especially those that aren't programming or engineering in nature
this is an explicitly noncommercial, share-alike space
don't force yourself to do work you don't enjoy, or demand it of others

(logo credit, with modifications by @[email protected])

founded 7 months ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Random Positivity Thread: Happy Computer Memories (awful.systems)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Time for some warm-and-fuzzies! What happy memories do you have from your early days of getting into computers/programming, whenever those early days happened to be?

When I was in middle school, I read an article in Discover Magazine about "artificial life" — computer simulations of biological systems. This sent me off on the path of trying to make a simulation of bugs that ran around and ate each other. My tool of choice was PowerBASIC, which was like QBasic except that it could compile to .EXE files. I decided there would be animals that could move, and plants that could also move. To implement a rule like "when the animal is near the plant, it will chase the plant," I needed to compute distances between points given their x- and y-coordinates. I knew the Pythagorean theorem, and I realized that the line between the plant and the animal is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Tada: I had invented the distance formula!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

In the mid-1990s, my family had a 386/16 and I had started to get into programming.

One night, my father comes in and notes a neighbour has put out mountains of old magazines.

I end up with like 5 years of mid-80s Compute!, the sort that were 60% code listings by weight. Judging by the annotations, the neighbour had an Atari 800-series. I only actually typed in a few of the programs, but there was a lot of technique to learn from.

Said neighbour also left out several stacks of similar vintage pornographic magazines. My brother took those, and that's arguably where we started to diverge.