How Developers Coded in 1985

Illustration for article titled How Developers Coded in 1985

Programmer John Graham-Cumming tells a fascinating story about what coding like was back in 1985. Unlike today's programmers who wear hoodies, down energy drinks and use a paper thin computer, programmers in 1985 had to code by hand... with actual paper.



John Graham-Cumming writes:



In our world that's become littered with gadgets, it's always mind blowing to see how far we've come in the past 30 years. It's like creating technology with nothing! [John Graham-Cumming]

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This is how I learned to program. I remember it being a real coup when my favorite debug monitor ROM got an "R" command for calculating the offset for a relative branch to an absolute address for me. This way, when I was writing the code on paper, I only had to keep track of the addresses of each instruction. You know what sucked? When you went to type in a relative branch and discovered the target of the branch was more than 128 bytes away and the relative displacement didn't reach anymore, so you had to negate the branch condition and make it branch around a JMP instruction, thus throwing off all the addresses you'd calculated for every instruction after that point on your paper. That sucked.