2 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 15.7 ms ] thread
Oldie but goodie.

I feel it must have been really satisfying to be able to get your instructions arranged so that you can just switch from sector (track?) to sector on the drum memory and have the head be in just the right place at the right time. Annoying if your loop is one byte too long though.

Now our hard drive controllers are more powerful than this.

Indeed. The fact that Mel had enough control to place an instruction at the "most pessimum" location too! I sometimes feel that I missed a "golden age" of computing when one person could make such a tremendous difference with such a small amount of code.