Coding on a 1980s Business Minicomputer!

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  • čas přidán 1. 08. 2024
  • NOTE: My understanding of Modulo was incorrect here. The actual remainder stored in "OPA" will be different than what I show in the video. In the examples, 28/3, the remainder will actually be 1 (9:3=27;28-27=1). For 37/5, the remainder will be 2 (5*7=35, 37-35=2).
    Happy holidays y’all! There are many different facets to the Centurion project that we’ve been working hard on, and one of those is cracking the code for… code. And, I think we’ve got it! Tag along as I walk through writing a program in CPL, Centurion Programming Language, and have all sorts of trouble with the built-in editor, compile errors, coding mistakes, etc. You know, the usual fair when programming anything!
    Centurion Wiki:
    github.com/Nakazoto/Centurion...
    All of the code used in this episode and the CPU6 Programmer's Manual are available at the links below:
    github.com/Nakazoto/Centurion...
    github.com/Nakazoto/Centurion...
    If you want to support the channel please hop over to Patreon:
    / usagielectric
    Also, we now have some epic shirts for sale!
    my-store-11554688.creator-spr...
    Come join us on Discord and Twitter!
    Discord: / discord
    Twitter: / usagielectric
    Intro Music adapted from:
    Artist: The Runaway Five
    Title: The Shinra Shuffle
    ocremix.org/remix/OCR01847
    Thanks for watching!
    Chapters
    0:00 Introduction
    1:00 What is a Centurion?
    5:08 Now a look at the software side
    7:27 What kind of code are we going to write today?
    8:33 Let’s spin the big boy up
    10:24 Time to start coding
    12:14 Necessary house keeping at beginning of code
    13:47 Setting formats and declaring variables
    15:38 Writing the entry into the program
    16:28 Printing text on the CRT
    17:28 Our main program loop
    22:59 Printing the answer
    24:06 Closing down the program and handing back control
    25:18 Compile attempt #1
    29:00 Compile attempt #2
    30:10 Compile attempt #3
    32:00 Compile attempt #4 (nailed it)
    33:10 Why was it so slow?
    33:56 What if you want to program something?
    35:50 Bunny!
  • Věda a technologie

Komentáře • 787

  • @kenromaine2387
    @kenromaine2387 Před rokem +206

    Just watched today's video on writing a new CPL program. New CPL source code Complied, Assembled, Linked and ran, great job team. This time last year we just started working on getting the Diag PROM Bd to run the diag, tests, what a year. To the CZcams viewers keep in mind when the Warrrex-Centurion was designed in the 1970's by a small team of people in Richardson, TX. This computer put food on the table and paid the bills for 100's of families for over 10 years. Regards, Ken R.

    • @JohnDlugosz
      @JohnDlugosz Před rokem +11

      I grew up in Plano, which is just north of Richardson, from 1976. I remember that area as having a lot of interesting computer tech. There was a supercomputer company there too, and I think that's the one started by Feynman's son. Later this would be the "Telecom Corridor" and it was more about switches and other telecom tech. This is close to where Texas Instruments is located, too.

    • @lawrencedoliveiro9104
      @lawrencedoliveiro9104 Před rokem +30

      Interesting to hear. But the name “CPL” makes me twitch a bit, because back in the 1960s it was the name of a British effort to put together a rival to IBM’s PL/I. The name stood for either “Combined Programming Language” or “Cambridge Plus London”, being the names of the two Universities involved in the effort.
      The full language as originally conceived was never implemented. But a cut-down version, intended for bootstrapping the full compiler, was put into use and achieved some popularity on various computers as a low-level systems programming language. It was called “BCPL”, which stood for either “Bootstrap CPL” or “Basic CPL”.
      Some folks at Bell Labs got hold of this, and saw it had some promise for implementing an operating system they were working on. They created their own, even more cut-down version, which they called “B”. This was then developed further, with the addition of types and structures (which the original BCPL did not have), into another language, called “C”.
      And the rest, as they say, is history.

    • @UsagiElectric
      @UsagiElectric  Před rokem +28

      Ken, thank you so much for all your help!
      We couldn't have gotten anywhere near this far if it hadn't been for your unbelievably good memory and excellent hardware repair skills!

    • @sebastienkneur1280
      @sebastienkneur1280 Před rokem +10

      It’s amazing what you all managed to do in so little time from this non-functional, long-forgotten, entirely proprietary undocumented technology.
      You managed to preserve this knowledge and demonstrate it in all its 8bit glory.
      Amazing !!!!

    • @VK2FVAX
      @VK2FVAX Před rokem +14

      So, the O/S is still under copywrite and they don't want to make it freely available. Fair call ..after all they wrote it. What about a hobbyist license? People sling a collective 10$ and they get a license to go play with it. Money gets donated to ..what ever the majority of the still living/interested copywrite owners decree? For 10$ for a hobbyist project ..who wouldn't sling some cash at it all? I certainly would.

  • @dont-want-no-wrench
    @dont-want-no-wrench Před rokem +10

    the guy who saved that manual deserves a badge of some kind. so much info like that just disappeared

  • @scottlarson1548
    @scottlarson1548 Před rokem +37

    The real exciting parts of these old multiuser systems is how they handle simultaneous access to files and databases. When you can run two or more programs that are heavily updating a huge file and the file doesn't get trashed, *that's* when you realize that someone worked very hard on the part of the OS that delegates file access to users.

    • @monad_tcp
      @monad_tcp Před rokem +2

      yep, DOS absolutely couldn't do that at all, you would need novell or something

    • @davidmccaffrey5665
      @davidmccaffrey5665 Před rokem

      ​@@monad_tcp4

  • @tunichtgut5285
    @tunichtgut5285 Před rokem +40

    This reminds me a little bit of my first C programming attempts on an Atari 520st. I had only one floppy drive. The C compiler from Digital Research was on ~10 floppy disk. You had to put the source code on a separate floppy disk and then switch between the compiler disks (the compiler would tell you which disk to insert) and the source code disk. If you inserted the wrong disk you had to start all over again. On compiler run took about 15 minutes.

    • @HPPalmtopTube
      @HPPalmtopTube Před rokem +4

      I used to program on the C64 using "Power C"...
      Although it came on 4 disks instead of 10 on your Atari, it required swapping disks up to 10 or 15 times even to compile one file of only 2-3KB, and it took the better of 10 minutes...
      It also lacked many useful header/libraries so you'd have to write nearly everything yourself.
      I would assume that your experience on the Atari was meant to be used with a hard drive, but the C64 never even had support for one of those back then, so you had no other options...

    • @axelBr1
      @axelBr1 Před rokem +1

      In 1989/1990 I had an Amstrad PCW something or other, that I used for writing my projects and doing a bit of PASCAL programming. It only had a single floppy, and wasn't multi-tasking, so had to reboot each time I switched between the editor and the compiler. During a programming session I got overly familiar with quitting without writing; which didn't end well when I switched back to a word processing session.

  • @TastyBusiness
    @TastyBusiness Před rokem +31

    Man, I felt that 31:44. That's a common sentiment when trying to be productive in janky old programming environments. Thank you for going to the effort of demonstrating this machine doing work.

    • @boblittle2529
      @boblittle2529 Před rokem +1

      Me too! Made me actually LOL because I've been there. I bet most of us watching this have been there too.

  • @PaxtonSanders
    @PaxtonSanders Před rokem +42

    Astonishing, I never thought I'd see an editor that makes vi look easy, or at least intuitive. Great job, Kompoz!

    • @fllthdcrb
      @fllthdcrb Před rokem +10

      You know, *nix systems have an editor of a similar type to Kompoz, called "ed". I believe it was the first editor for Unix. Maybe it's not as bad, but it too makes vi look easy.

    • @genderender
      @genderender Před rokem +11

      ​@@fllthdcrb "ed" standing for "line editor". It filled the same purpose as compose, but even more stripped back. There was never a UI version of ed, so you always had to rely on the terminal to maintain information
      Was developed in the era *before* CRTs and inspired a compose-like version called "ex" with actual UI features (like a text buffer wow). And said ex was further developed so you could edit the buffer directly in a visual manner, creating "vi". Can even use ex-mode in Vim today

    • @dwainsims3065
      @dwainsims3065 Před rokem +6

      Egad! I recall using "ed" to edit data files on a PDP in 1982-84. It was abysmal - I just not realize it at the time.

    • @mkinitcpio
      @mkinitcpio Před rokem +4

      yeah its funny how when it was unveiled vi was a tremendous advance in user friendliness, but it was also criticized for being wasteful. Terminals and connections were extremely slow and often paper-based so the terseness of interactive programs output was highly valued

    • @honza970
      @honza970 Před 5 měsíci

      the 'ex' syntax is often used in vi. That is what you do when you enter : command, like :q! is how to exit the vi and also how to exit the ex.

  • @JoeBurnett
    @JoeBurnett Před rokem +74

    I REALLY enjoyed this video! Your difficulty reminds me of all the frustration I experienced while learning to program 6502 ASM code on my Apple IIe as a teenager back in the 80s. Congratulations on your progress!

    • @UsagiElectric
      @UsagiElectric  Před rokem +6

      Thank you so much!
      Programming is difficult no matter what language, but a confusing editor can really make it something that'll push your patience to the max, haha.

    • @KameraShy
      @KameraShy Před rokem +2

      Those were the days!

    • @KameraShy
      @KameraShy Před rokem +10

      @@UsagiElectric BUT ... regardless of how awkward, confusing and rudimentary an interactive editor is, those of us who began programming on punch cards still really appreciate it. Or think about programming on a remote computer through a dial up connection at 300 baud. Or on a teletype terminal that lists the program by printing on paper. In the mid-70's programmers at big companies used terminals for IBM mainframes that were enhanced Selectric typewriters.

    • @TesterAnimal1
      @TesterAnimal1 Před rokem +7

      I remember actually writing COBOL code onto coding sheets and having them sent away to be entered by operators and compile errors come back the next day.
      That was in the 1980. Absolutely bonkers. That was British Rail, an old, publicly owned company full of time wasters.
      I still have no clue what the system was about, and I never got anything useful done there. So ridiculous.

    • @alanduncan3710
      @alanduncan3710 Před rokem +1

      I learned IBM 360 assembly language on punch cards in the late 70's. It was running on a Burroughs 6800 mainframe with a simulator program. You only got 2 compiles per day.

  • @richardclarke376
    @richardclarke376 Před rokem +25

    Shaking my head at how you do string assignments! Even 40 years ago this machine was clearly way behind the state of the art. On a PDP-11 under RSTS at that time I was using a full screen editor to create programs in the excellent 'Basic Plus' language. You could still be somewhat productive using those tools today !

    • @edgeeffect
      @edgeeffect Před rokem +2

      Yeah, that was an amazing editor on the VT100 ... Really hard work if your terminal isn't cursor addressable though.

    • @TesterAnimal1
      @TesterAnimal1 Před rokem +3

      @@edgeeffect the VT100 was cursor addressable. Once the TPU editor came out editing was easy.
      Before that the edit program was all typed commands.

    • @richardclarke376
      @richardclarke376 Před rokem +3

      This is not to throw shade at the Centurion dev team. They probably only had 2-3 developers for this entire system which as Ken says paid hundreds of mortgages of people during the 70s and 80s.

    • @jessepollard7132
      @jessepollard7132 Před rokem

      @@TesterAnimal1 edt worked quite well with the VT100. Even teco would work in a screen mode.

  • @VernGraner
    @VernGraner Před rokem

    It has been SO MUCH FUN watching you work on this machine! A labor of love and a true contribution to creating a resilient history of these super cool old machines. KUDOS! 👍😁

  • @Professorke
    @Professorke Před rokem +6

    Wow, this is nostalgia for me, reliving my young programming days again. You are the best! Happy New Year and I wish you good health and lots of retrocode.

  • @captainchaos3667
    @captainchaos3667 Před rokem +4

    I appreciate that you always show us at the end that these projects are being properly supervised.

  • @mephustowest1876
    @mephustowest1876 Před rokem +4

    It was so exciting watching the Centurion running code. I really enjoyed this video. Congratulations on the progress and I can't wait to see more developments. Happy New Year!

  • @TheVintageApplianceEmporium

    I just love it when you get all excited and happy 🤩

  • @fredrikvanlienden6749
    @fredrikvanlienden6749 Před rokem +2

    This is a very interesting series, i've never used these kinds of machines, and I find it really informative and exciting.
    Kudos to all who put in effort to make this happen.

  • @TheRetroEngine
    @TheRetroEngine Před rokem +12

    Oh wow. I have a ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. This is PROPER retro, having a mini/mainframe in your workroom and coding like this. Loved seeing it. I started my career on an ICL-ME29 as a Computer Operator running Cobol job streams (if I remember rightly) which moved onto Unix after a couple of year. Great seeing this old kit put to use, and the memory/CPU 'restrictions' showed how much can be gotten through it.

  • @aldergas01
    @aldergas01 Před rokem +10

    I just wanted to express my heartfelt gratitude for all the hard work you put into restoring vintage computer systems. Your expertise as an electronic engineer is truly impressive and your dedication to the craft is admirable. You are a person of great quality and I have no doubt that your contributions to the field will continue to make a positive impact.
    I hope that this new year brings you all the success and happiness you deserve. Wishing you a happy 2023!

  • @marcoroose9973
    @marcoroose9973 Před rokem +13

    How glad I am to have a modern programming language and a modern IDE for coding! Great video about ancient coding!

    • @HPPalmtopTube
      @HPPalmtopTube Před rokem

      You definately are! :)
      Imagine the carpal tunnel and other sores in your hands you'd get after a day of coding with Kompoz on this ancient beast...
      The lack of an easy command line history in modern shells also sounds painful...

  • @GentryBa1
    @GentryBa1 Před rokem +1

    Will watch it this night! I LOVE YOUR Minicomputer videos! 🥰

  • @LelandMaurello
    @LelandMaurello Před rokem

    Love the 'dance for joy' when the program finally compiles and gives an answer. I remember doing many of those learning programming.

  • @sammytimgaming2947
    @sammytimgaming2947 Před rokem

    Oh my god, I've been watching since the first few videos.
    Keep up the good work!

  • @AirPiracy
    @AirPiracy Před rokem

    Oh my gosh...I'm getting the shakes remembering how challenging it was to program even the most basic programs in the early '80s! Well done!

  • @ironlion45
    @ironlion45 Před 2 měsíci

    The palpable excitement Dave expresses when he gets things working in this video is really heartwarming. :D

  • @britz4393
    @britz4393 Před rokem

    You opened some very old memories. Lots of head banging. I loved the video.

  • @balloonvendor
    @balloonvendor Před rokem +1

    Enjoying your videos from Japan. Since 2023 is the year of the Usagi in Japan,🐇 May you continue to make great strides. (Like a rabbit jumping)

  • @Hitchhiker_a.d.R.
    @Hitchhiker_a.d.R. Před rokem

    I came across the centurion playlist two days ago when I took a little break from studying for my upcoming exams... let's just say I haven't learned a thing about organic chemistry in the past 48 hours.
    Thank you for your excellent work, both in terms of the videos and the repair itself!

  • @jonvaljean76790
    @jonvaljean76790 Před rokem +2

    Beautiful video, thank you for that trip down memory lane. When I was a just.starting.out programmer working for ACT in the Milan office, writing the Linkage Editor for the Olivetti A7 minicomputer, 1973, we used coding sheets. That’s right. We wrote out each line of code on a formatted sheet of paper. We could then walk through the proposed code - called it a “code walk-through” and discover various stupid errors. After a number of expresso stops - the coffee was brought up from the bar on the ground floor, in little individual thermos containers - the code could be entered into the machine and since we were good … it often worked first time. That was the most important lesson of coding once upon a time. Go slow, step by step, think it through, and catch mistakes before they occur. Became a mantra of Deming … rework is harder than doing it right the first time. Thank you so much !

  • @AJMjazz
    @AJMjazz Před rokem +2

    Well done! You brought back nightmares of my college days. But they were good nightmares.

  • @Phostings1
    @Phostings1 Před rokem +7

    Wow, I really enjoyed myself watching this! I'm fairly new to the programming scene and just got my new job as a software engineer. Even though our text editors are so much better today, it amazes me to see how difficult CPL can be just to edit in its environment! You did an awesome job debugging your code. Congrats on making it all work!

    • @Conenion
      @Conenion Před rokem

      Lukily, editors have much improved since then ;-D

  • @bryandowdey1779
    @bryandowdey1779 Před rokem +9

    Happy New Year and congratulations on your first successful program on the Centurion! Your efforts and frustration remind me of my programming days back in the mid to late 1970's! Brought back a whole load of memories! 😀

    • @UsagiElectric
      @UsagiElectric  Před rokem +1

      Thank you, and Happy New Year to you and yours as well!
      Y'all were proper programmers back in the day. The necessity to keep the full structure of your program in your head and work from there is something that I'm glad I experienced but certainly not envious of, haha.

    • @highpath4776
      @highpath4776 Před rokem

      @@UsagiElectric 1) If you are going to use a system designed from tape use , better get a tape unit for the machine... 2) For programming I was always taught to write down (pen and paper) what I was going to get typed into the machine - this should help get your structure / " ; etc correct as you can (or get someone else) to step through it and spot errors. Of course you need to check for typos still. 3) It is always worth copying your first saved file to a "backup / ver0.00 " file that you can bring back if you edit the working programme and find you have lost something" (3a the use these days of "undo" as a command or whatever in "apps", is that poss on the likes of these 8 bit systems ?

  • @neleabels
    @neleabels Před rokem

    Thanks for that great video! I really love seeing these old machines actually in operation and not only listening to people talk about them. And archaeological coding is a favourite of mine.:)

  • @Croaker369
    @Croaker369 Před rokem

    That is is really good demonstration on how things use to be in the 70’s when it came to programming minis and mainframes

  • @StevenIngram
    @StevenIngram Před rokem

    I'm glad someone is working on a basic text editor. That makes all the difference in the world.

  • @rickkephartactual7706

    This video brought back a lot of memories. I loved it at the time but I would never want to go back to that. I'm spoiled rotten now. Thank you

  • @steenhansen8
    @steenhansen8 Před rokem +1

    Yyaaaayy, love this. I learned assembly, Cobol and more in 1980 and this is just totally memory lane :-)

  • @rzerobzero
    @rzerobzero Před 11 měsíci

    Goodness, I felt each one of those errors in my soul. Good for you for figuring this all out.

  • @cpm1003
    @cpm1003 Před rokem

    That is some awesome, crazy syntax! Very cool that you are figuring it out.

  • @ehsnils
    @ehsnils Před rokem

    I have been dipping my toe a bit into a few older machines and I do appreciate the effort needed to get them running to the level that you can write a program on them.
    Today it's a lot easier, but I also think that we have lost some really neat and nice solutions on the way as well.

  • @johnhermanson1156
    @johnhermanson1156 Před rokem

    Hadn't heard the name "CPL" spoken for many years - unless I'm getting my wires crossed, it was the foundation that a Z80 development system ran on top of that I once used. And now I know what the letters mean. Thankfully my mission was the Intel assembly code we used it to develop and not dealing with actual CPL, it's native editor or inner workings. Still, my co-workers and I had our share of struggles very similar to what you just went through. I really appreciate how you have fun with this older stuff and you mostly refrain from reminding your audience how dated the technology is - no reminder needed. Your exacerbation and finally triumph was a pretty frequent and common shared experience back then!

  • @martinhaub6828
    @martinhaub6828 Před rokem

    Boy was that interesting! Watching you go through the torture of editing the program made me appreciate the genius of line numbers in timesharing BASIC in replacing errors. How far we've come in 40 years!

    • @JohnDlugosz
      @JohnDlugosz Před rokem

      Yea, as someone with a one-line 24-character display, I could really appreciate the use of line numbers to specify where to put a new line or targeting a line to be edited.

  • @soapyfrog
    @soapyfrog Před rokem

    So enjoyable this video. So relatable from times gone by. I could have watched this in real time to share your pain!

  • @xjet
    @xjet Před rokem +1

    Ah takes me back to the late 1970s when I was working with a Signetics 2650 8- bit CPU and had nothing more than the 1Kbyte PIPBUG monitor rom as system firmware. All programs had to be written in assembler and then converted to hex codes for keyed entry (ie: hand-assembled). So much work but such a buzz when even the simplest program was debugged and working. Kids today.... 🙂

  • @MrAsBBB
    @MrAsBBB Před rokem +2

    Suddenly found your channel. I just love it. It’s my whole history of computing . From where you need 32 Amps for a processor to an iPhone. What a journey !
    Just love the noise of the fans behind you. I so miss that. All the cooling coming up through the floor. What a pleasure :-) Programming was programming. Oh one of our Integraph pdp11/70 wouldn’t boot. I had to slap the 8.5 inch floppy for it to boot.such fun

  • @malcolmgibson6288
    @malcolmgibson6288 Před rokem +2

    Takes me back more years than I care to remember, and my first efforts at programming. 👍

  • @mikekopack6441
    @mikekopack6441 Před rokem +120

    I'm getting serious COBOL flashbacks watching this.... my eye is twitching... UGH... the IDIOTIC way we did things back in the 70's...

    • @geofftaylor8913
      @geofftaylor8913 Před rokem +7

      Ha ha ha. Oh I hated COBOL in the day.

    • @DrHughJohnson
      @DrHughJohnson Před rokem +16

      I have to use COBOL still, it’s insane.

    • @mikekopack6441
      @mikekopack6441 Před rokem +4

      @@DrHughJohnson yeah I’d be finding another job!

    • @chriswatson2407
      @chriswatson2407 Před rokem +8

      I don't think I ever managed to actually compile in COBOL. I switched to Pascal which I still write to this day for my job.

    • @sparkplug1018
      @sparkplug1018 Před rokem +13

      Complies Only By Odd Luck. According to my father that was the feeling, he was very happy to be rid of it.

  • @solidstate0
    @solidstate0 Před rokem

    Man! That thing is stacked - and a 5MHz CPU too! Had to laugh, I thought you were going to have to hotwire that thing when you said you'd no key - but then to see you actually 'Pick' the lock - priceless. Excellent work dude!

  • @tarzankom
    @tarzankom Před rokem

    I'd been growing impatient waiting for a new video on the Centurion. Always an interesting topic.

    • @tarzankom
      @tarzankom Před rokem

      After having watched the whole video, I think you need someone to write a port of vi for the Centurion.

  • @MarcelHuguenin
    @MarcelHuguenin Před rokem +2

    Happy New Year to you and your family! I feel with you remembering now the time I had to program on CP/M (and CCP/M, Concurrent CP/M on a NorthStar Multi User machine). Editing always was a drag and I had to re-enter stuff many times. You did a great job! Regards, Marcel

  • @aharkness5657
    @aharkness5657 Před rokem

    This video is such an accurate display of what programming is like :-D

  • @LoneWolf0648
    @LoneWolf0648 Před rokem +1

    i could only imagine his reaction if one of the errors lead to another bad chip somewhere.
    its good to see this thing doing something thats not an included function, great work.

  • @daghtus
    @daghtus Před rokem +1

    LPL would be so proud of ya for picking the lock like a boss with that wave rake.

  • @sergiostanislauskas8985

    You certainly have balls of steel! The OS looks a lot like M/PM... It's incredible how people wrote serious systems in these "business" computers in the 70's, 80''s... I remember writing a Pert/CPM program in a TRS-80 and guys using it to control projects with 200-300 activities as the company did not have enough money to pay for IBM Projacs.... These small computers really changed the computing landscape!

  • @graealex
    @graealex Před rokem +21

    Lockpicking lawyer would be proud of you. Btw you can disassemble the lock and file a working key from a blank. Or just get the whole lock to a locksmith, and he'll give you a working key from his collection.

    • @KameraShy
      @KameraShy Před rokem +4

      Or just swap a toggle switch.

    • @CATech1138
      @CATech1138 Před rokem

      Or gut the lock

    • @graealex
      @graealex Před rokem +5

      @@KameraShy I think the overall theme is to keep everything intact and original, so just getting a key for the lock would mean everything stays genuine. If he can rake it open in one second, that shouldn't be too hard.

  • @sebastienkneur1280
    @sebastienkneur1280 Před rokem +9

    It’s incredible to be able to see these old tools in action and imagine how people worked back then. The learning curve and the tediousness are such it makes me hard to imagine how they were convinced to put so much money and time into this and get productivity gains.

    • @sdjhgfkshfswdfhskljh3360
      @sdjhgfkshfswdfhskljh3360 Před rokem +3

      I don't think it is that hard to learn. It is more boring. You need to make lots of unnecessary steps.

    • @UsagiElectric
      @UsagiElectric  Před rokem +7

      Programming for the machine was certainly an exercise in mental fortitude, but I think once you got the hang of the editor, it would be a lot easier. However, from an end-user perspective, a lot of the applications are incredibly user friendly and very well written!
      One thing I didn't touch on in this video (but will in the next), is that writing an executable in CPL is only half of the job. The Centurion actually makes use of an in-depth scripting language called JCL (Job Control Language), and a lot of things like printing to the screen, getting input from the user, making conditional choices, etc. are all handled by JCL, with the script calling the executable only at the end once it's gotten all the necessary information saved in the appropriate places.
      JCL is even more obtuse and difficult to follow than CPL, but the two together are incredibly powerful!

  • @jimle22
    @jimle22 Před rokem

    Man, congratulations. You got a lot more patience than I will ever have.

  • @realzneo
    @realzneo Před rokem

    Well done!! Very interesting to see!! Happy New Year, and thank you for making these videos!!

  • @tstahlfsu
    @tstahlfsu Před rokem

    So cool, man! I also punched the air when you got it going! 🎉🎉🎉

  • @micione1975
    @micione1975 Před rokem

    Screen and characters are so beautiful!!

  • @Pehr81
    @Pehr81 Před rokem

    What a great tutorial for all the Centurion user out there!

  • @Seftdelmer
    @Seftdelmer Před rokem

    Wow, when you consider what shape the system was in originally, this is really some achievement. Well done.

  • @rancidbeef582
    @rancidbeef582 Před rokem +1

    Vintage computers AND a bit of Lock Picking Lawyer! Love it!

  • @ticklemesenpai447
    @ticklemesenpai447 Před rokem +1

    Man what a cool channel. Also I died laughing when you pulled out the lockpicking tools to turn this thing on.

  • @Zadster
    @Zadster Před rokem

    Good work! And a happy 2023, here's to more frustrations with utter elation at the end!

  • @mikekopack6441
    @mikekopack6441 Před rokem +3

    THIS... THIS is where the idea of Computer Programmers being "High Priests" of the machine came from. Look at all the esoteric crazy non-intuitive things you had to do just to write a simple math problem! Thank god we've come so far. Of course, by the 1976 there were the big 3 microcomputers each running BASIC that you could have done the same thing on at home just as fast (ok maybe not AS fast given interpreted BASIC vs compiled code) and a LOT easier!

    • @Rob2
      @Rob2 Před rokem

      It is more like 1977 when that happened... and a lot happened in a year in those days.

  • @johnhelt5475
    @johnhelt5475 Před rokem

    This was a fun video. Maybe by this time next year, you will be solving Advent of Code puzzles in CPL on the Centurion! Thank you for sharing. Keep up the awesome work!

  • @MrAsBBB
    @MrAsBBB Před rokem

    I truly remember this enjoyment. It’s palpable.

  • @absenttk4213
    @absenttk4213 Před rokem +1

    During the time in which I watched this video, I wrote this program in C#, showered, wrote this program in C++, ate, then wrote this program in C.
    Right about the time it ended I caught up on my daily prayers to the GCC gods.

  • @overlandkltolondon
    @overlandkltolondon Před rokem

    Watching you use kompoz makes me glad we have tools such as vi these days.

  • @John_Krone
    @John_Krone Před rokem

    It is so satisfying to write on those older keyboards. One must respect those old first programmers. wow

  • @byteforever7829
    @byteforever7829 Před rokem

    I was invested 100% in this seeing you get the correct answer, brilliant !!! (PS I'll start using "Smart Rocks" as a synonym for computer from now on :)

  • @lilithcal
    @lilithcal Před rokem +2

    Oh my gawd, a shiver just went down my spine. My first home computer was an Altair 8800 (still have it) but my first business computer was a Centurion by Warrex. Seems to be that same configuration. Same line printer. We switched out printers at some point and I got to take the printer home with me. Also added a tape backup at one point but I had nothing but trouble with it.
    Programming in CPL was a drudge but they eventually added conditional looping and it allowed me to change my programming style.
    Eventually I was laid off for economy reasons but got to keep the printer, now lost to history when I had to give up my house.

  • @DwightWalker
    @DwightWalker Před rokem +1

    It was very good how you remembered the obtuse shell commands to operate the compiler and editor. Yes before there were graphics, text based systems were all there were in 1980s. It was like PDP-10, PDP-11 and VAX/VMS which I used at University of Queensland in Australia.

  • @tonycoombs17
    @tonycoombs17 Před rokem

    Fantastic! I really enjoyed this session! Happy New year!

  • @tonycanning8518
    @tonycanning8518 Před rokem

    Omg, such a blast from the past. I started on Minicomuters and terminals ...

  • @martinstam5241
    @martinstam5241 Před rokem

    Kidding aside: super-kudos for solving an Euler challenge on the Centurion.

  • @b0neme
    @b0neme Před rokem

    Congratulations! You are now a programmer! You experienced the total panic of failure, and with a tweak, the thrill of success! Computers are fun like that. After hours of looking at a core dump in COBOL or emulating your app for iPhone, you FINALLY find the bug, and squish it!!! Welcome to The Brotherhood!

  • @rogersliva4120
    @rogersliva4120 Před rokem

    Thank you for a 36 minute summary of my entire career.

  • @hjdorn
    @hjdorn Před rokem

    Happy new year to you!

  • @ExtremeMetal
    @ExtremeMetal Před rokem +21

    It'd be interesting to see the centurion run the Mandelbrot benchmark written by Matt Heffernan to see how it stacks up against 80s 8 bit home systems and also James Sharman's homemade pipelined 8 bit CPU.

    • @mrkosmos9421
      @mrkosmos9421 Před rokem

      +1, totally agree

    • @Vanders456
      @Vanders456 Před rokem

      Sure but are *you* going to type that in using that terrible editor?

    • @mrkosmos9421
      @mrkosmos9421 Před rokem

      I'd actually do this with both assembly and CPL, like the benchmarks

    • @mrkosmos9421
      @mrkosmos9421 Před rokem

      @@Vanders456 Writing from a modern PC to a floppy maybe?

    • @ExtremeMetal
      @ExtremeMetal Před rokem

      @@Vanders456 porting nano might be necessary first.

  • @andrewdunbar828
    @andrewdunbar828 Před rokem

    I've been waiting to see some coding on this beastie!

  • @boblittle2529
    @boblittle2529 Před rokem

    I've been in computer programming for 34 years and written code in BASIC to assembly and many languages in between. This video makes me appreciate how rough programmers before me had it. Some of you who hate VIM should be glad you don't have to use Kompoze.

  • @tomnewsom9124
    @tomnewsom9124 Před rokem

    Just got through bingeing the whole playlist and I have to say it's one of the best of its kind. Simply superb. I don't think I've ever seen such cute bunnies and kittens. Shame about the 30 minute retro computing intro sequence though 😁

  • @idlewise
    @idlewise Před rokem

    Brings back so many memories! I was the only undergrad at university that had the key code to the PDP11-23 "lab"

  • @echandler
    @echandler Před rokem +4

    Congrats on getting your program to run. Now all you need is for someone to port TECO to the Centurion. :)!

  • @geekgeek3353
    @geekgeek3353 Před rokem

    Amazing video. It reminds me the days when I worked on the Fujitsu M-360 computer.

  • @parkpunk2
    @parkpunk2 Před rokem

    I love that blue with the wood paneling!

  • @frankkolmann4801
    @frankkolmann4801 Před rokem

    Watching now makes my insides twist and squirm. Coding on the PDP 8 at the time was exciting.

  • @michaelbenn4741
    @michaelbenn4741 Před rokem +5

    LOL, how we used to do things :-) I used work on the Phoenix drives you mentioned attached to Wang 2200 systems, and they were great when they worked, but boy, did they seem to crash a lot! That smell and that awful screeching noise still haunt my nightmares! After a head crash there was the fun of replacing the heads, then getting the damned things aligned. Oh the joys of being mini-computer maintainence engineer!
    Great video! BTW, at around 21:15 the text on the screen shows strings being declared using " ' STRING ' ", but your voice-over and what you type are in the format ' " STRING " '.

    • @michaelbenn4741
      @michaelbenn4741 Před rokem +1

      Ahah! I should have waited for the end of the video, LOL ;-)

  • @onetruekeeper
    @onetruekeeper Před rokem

    Nothing like spending relaxing hours programming this thing.

  • @juamont
    @juamont Před 11 měsíci

    I swear the youtube algorythm is dumber everyday, I litterally searched "1980s coding" several times the last few months and this channel NEVER came up

  • @maximilianostanco4531

    Hermoso video. Súper completo! Me encantó!!!!

  • @GreatLakesDrifta
    @GreatLakesDrifta Před rokem

    Wow, that would be super stressful having to debug on that during a critical fire drill…. Was pretty cool watching it compile that source code, though. Great vid!

  • @augustuscrocker9328
    @augustuscrocker9328 Před rokem

    Fun blast from the past -- reminded me of writing lots of code for machines like this. From a programmer-of-those-times perspective, your reactions to the kludgy text editor were amusing and deja vu clench-worthy. In our day, we desk-checked our code and made every effort to avoid using the compiler as a debugging tool! The early ASYNC/ASCII character-cell CRTs were effectively paper-free teletypes and nearly useless as text-editing devices (though we wrote lots of code on them), and until the DEC VT-100 came along, there were no standards for full-screen operations, which created a market for word processing and enabled such wonders as in-line editing, etc in the ASCII world. For large projects, some of us continued to rely on unit record devices like card readers

  • @erichkohl9317
    @erichkohl9317 Před rokem +2

    That editor makes me appreciate vim, as a casual Linux user.
    I wrote a program in FORTRAN about a year ago just for fun... the experience was very similar to this!

  • @jimb032
    @jimb032 Před rokem

    Love this video!
    I actually don't mind that language...but then again I used to write System 36 RPG II.
    Screen writes are expensive, processor wise...interleave your progress wheel more (less updates).
    +1000 for using it! It was my go-to in the day.

  • @nickblackburn1903
    @nickblackburn1903 Před rokem

    Nice work, this is a beautiful computer. Just look at 15:48 - the keyboard is lovely. Well done!

  • @shinedom
    @shinedom Před rokem +18

    As a pascal native programmer i really understsnd the efforts, the suffering but also the joy wen the compiled propgram works. I think it may be very interesting to go trought the machine code to really understand the steps the CPU does during the execution

    • @UsagiElectric
      @UsagiElectric  Před rokem +4

      This was actually day two of filming too! The first day of filming it all feel apart about midway through and I had to come back in to the emulator and spend some time sussing things out. In the end I couldn't use any of the footage from day one, so seeing it actually print the right answer was properly exciting!
      I believe we could get the full compiled assembly from one of the temp files, but the we still don't actually have a full grasp on the entire ISA, though we're getting a lot closer. It would definitely be interesting to see how the assembly achieves the same thing, but I would also definitely need someone to walk me through it first, haha.

    • @KameraShy
      @KameraShy Před rokem +4

      Wasn't Pascal the wave of the future? What happened to it?

    • @meindertsprang7491
      @meindertsprang7491 Před rokem +8

      @@KameraShy It evolved. I learnt Pascal at school, being initially designed as an educational language. Then I got my first computer (after using the Intel SDK85, a 6502 kit and an Acorn Atom), a massive 2 drive CP/M beast that came with full Pascal MT+ compiler. Then there was MSDOS and Turbo Pascal, which evolved into Borland Pascal. It is still very much alive as Delphi (Embracadero) and I use it every day to write and maintain the windows configuration software that come with our products.

    • @AMcAFaves
      @AMcAFaves Před rokem +3

      @@KameraShy Down another branch, Niklaus Wirth after designing Pascal, designed Modula(-2) and then designed Oberon, which is not only a programming language, but also an OS (which he has also designed a RISC chip to run on.)

    • @Ice_Karma
      @Ice_Karma Před rokem +3

      @@AMcAFaves Down _another_ another branch, Anders Hejlsberg, the guy who created Turbo Pascal, has been at Microsoft for some time, where he created C#.

  • @tubical71
    @tubical71 Před rokem

    Great series, and keep it up.. I learned programming on a 8085 with nothing than some 7seqment displays and 128bytes of ram... Then I had basic, assembler, cobol, pascal and C(++)....how far we have come during 50years regarding computers 🤩👍😊

  • @johankotze42
    @johankotze42 Před rokem

    Great video. Reminds me so much of my first encounters with computers.

  • @MrAsBBB
    @MrAsBBB Před rokem

    I spent my time 30 years ago making a progress bar where the “>” went across the screen. Oh how time flies. You did brilliant 35:37

  • @andrewbrady8564
    @andrewbrady8564 Před rokem

    You did it, I'm proud of you