IBM 5150 PC

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 10:40 PM, Ethan Dicks<ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote: I had an original 5150. If I remember correctly, mine came with 2.1. (this was the 8th grade for me) Then when I was at school, i snuck into the nurse's office and sat down at one of two XTs they had. (Not sure why they were in the nurse's office). I was in awe over the hard drive, which was the first I had ever seen. I was also excited about finding a new version of DOS (3.3) since debug had an assembler! Debug in 2.1 would only unassemble. I managed to make a bootable 3.3 floppy that worked on my home machine. Now you could type in opcodes and it would translate them into bytes. Up to that point, I had been unassembling random memory looking for the instruction that I wanted, then writing down the bytes, and reverse-engineering the address offset parts of the machine language instructions, then typing the bytes back in to write programs. I managed to write some fairly rudimentary programs by using just the assembler in debug. The programs were silly and mostly useless, but it was good experience though. Years later at university, I had an assembly language class. I was delighted when the professor switched it from system/370 to intel assembly. I slept through the class and got an A. And to think that my parents were very hesitant to buy a computer for me, convinced that I would only use it to play games. Later, I worked for a year and a half making minimum wage to save money to buy an amiga. They wouldn't spend a dime to help me with that computer either, since everyone knew it was a game machine. I played a lot of games on it, but it also taught me 68000 assembly and this useless skill called C. brian