FreeAssembly

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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

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

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

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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!

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Early teens: ZX series, typing in programs from magazine listings.

Then a pretty big jump, I tried to construct a raytracing program from first principles in high school.

In uni I got a really cheap 386 w/ 2 meg memory, could run Win3.1 on it and dial-up to uni's FirstClass system (remember them?)

First "home page" in 1995 or so? Uni tilde account.

Got the Linux bug in '97 or so, installed Debian on floppies (had to liberate 2 more megs from another machine)

In the early 2000s I really liked messing around with some BSD's.

After that computers became more and more of a job, so I kind of lost interest in messing around with them.