!!Con 2017: BEEP!! See AppleSoft BASIC and 6502 assembly language written on an actual Apple IIc ...
59BEEP!! See AppleSoft BASIC and 6502 assembly language written on an actual Apple IIc from the 80s! Fresh on startup with no software installed! by Richard Harrington
What’s the first thing you see when you turn on your computer? Back in the day (1983 or thereabouts) on the Apple II+/e/c, it was a command prompt and a blinking cursor! You had no choice but to start programming, and it was easy because it was BASIC! You could even drop down to an assembly language prompt and start poking around and entering instructions in the idiom of the 6502 processor itself! We’ll write a short animation program in BASIC, a subroutine in 6502 assembly, and call the latter from the former, all with no software installed but the ROM that came with the computer! (Speaker’s actual Apple IIc from childhood used in talk!)
Richard Harrington started programming in 1980, ran away from it for the theater in 1984 at the age of 15, then returned to his first love 25 years later, after touring the world with (among other things) a clown show called Motel California: the heartwarming tale of a ruthless Belgian mercenary who gives up his life of killing for the cabaret. Richard is currently a software engineer at SoundCloud.