Comment by jacquesm
4 months ago
Likewise, I've lost all of my code from the 8 bit era, no big deal, really, but it would have been fun to read some of it.
One of the more interesting projects was to make an annotated listing of the 6809 version of MS Basic for the Dragon 32. We learned so much just by studying that code. It was only 16K and yet we spent months on that.
And for stuff we wrote ourselves, a real-time 3D renderer for simple 3D models in 6502 assembly was probably the pinnacle.
I was fortunate to have learned to code in an environment where a lot of excellent programmers were kind enough to help me out. For example, my roommate showed me how stacks worked. It was like magic!
For me the big coin drop was arrays. That took a while.
For me something similar. I was using lots of if-then for the program logic, and a fellow student showed me how to replace that with an array. Wow!
Another epiphany was when I was reading the source code for ADVENT (the original Adventure game). There was a comment in the listing "A troll is a modified dwarf". And voila! I discovered inheritance.