Re:Using Code Snippets in Chrome Developer Tools
by userbinator on Saturday July 30, 2016 @11:50AM
(#12193455)
I don't remember there being any way (unless you count BAT files) to easily get started writing programs.
The DEBUG utility would let you write small utilities in Asm, and PC magazines would publish source code listings in a format suitable for use with it --- the assembler had no labels so any address calculations needed to be done manually, but IMHO that just made it easier for people to see how "code" and "data" are really the same thing interpreted in different ways. It was limited to producing "flat binary" COM files up to 64K in size, but you quickly realise that when using Asm, 64K is a lot of code and a lot of interesting things can be done with far less; most of these utilities were in the hundreds of bytes to single-digit-kilobytes range.
Compare that with today when a compiled "Hello world" binary in C is already larger than the majority of the utilities supplied with MS-DOS...
The DEBUG utility would let you write small utilities in Asm, and PC magazines would publish source code listings in a format suitable for use with it --- the assembler had no labels so any address calculations needed to be done manually, but IMHO that just made it easier for people to see how "code" and "data" are really the same thing interpreted in different ways. It was limited to producing "flat binary" COM files up to 64K in size, but you quickly realise that when using Asm, 64K is a lot of code and a lot of interesting things can be done with far less; most of these utilities were in the hundreds of bytes to single-digit-kilobytes range.
Compare that with today when a compiled "Hello world" binary in C is already larger than the majority of the utilities supplied with MS-DOS...