Time Travel, 6502 Assembly

I’ve never googled myself in images before that is, until, today.  The results were amazingly accurate, however I noticed an old green screen monitor in some of the results.

Stranger still, it looked vaguely like a program I had written as a teenager.  It was called beautiful boot.  In a nutshell, it replaced the OS on a disk in place of a dynamic catalog.  This in turn, freed up valuable real estate on the floppy which made room for .. well.. more games.  Why is this strange?

  1. I wrote the code as a teenager in the 80s.  This is 30 years later.
  2. Someone took the time to disassemble (AND COMMENT!)  my code.
  3. Someone took the time to write about how it blew their mind at the time.

Here’s why I’m proud of what I did then:

  1. I actually stopped playing games long enough to create something that the world used for years to come.  Free, useful, cool.
  2. Even then, you can see how I cared about usability, efficiency, savings.  I like that what worked then as a teenager still works well as a CEO today
  3. I hand crafted the typeface.  I love type.  I love that people noticed it was stylish while easy to read.  Back then, you did it one pixel at a time, no tools.  Get out a piece of graph paper, draw the bits, convert binary 
  4. Amazingly small footprint.  A graphics subsystem, audio subsystem, animation, entire ascii FONT,  and disk I/O layer.  How big?  4KB.  Yes, only 4KB.  Crazy.  Back then, programmers carried screwdrivers.  Scary times indeed.
  5. It was self mutating/modifying.  It would persist itself with new state.

It was one of the earlier things I wrote.  I went on to develop things most probably don’t remember but were insanely ahead of their time - HBBS, Megaterm, Pixterm, The Parrot, A shape shifter/editor, etc.  Good times.

So, want to see what hand crafted 8 bit assembly looks like?  Take a look at the source.  Pretty crazy what you could do if you weren’t dating girls or drinking.