WARNING, NORTON AV has unsound heuristic scanning.

[Bill Cravener]

The vast majority of early assembler code was obscure badly written undocumented CRAP.

Well that may be true Steve but those crappy books and asm code helped fuel the fire and encouraged me to learn asm and to be a better asm programmer then the author who wrote the book. I was referring to the old DOS days of programming when most everyone learning asm wrote crappy code.

So what's your point, that we were all crappy coders back in the early to mid eighties ??

[dedndave]

it was easy to be good with the 8086 CPU
each processor that came out after that made it harder and harder to be anything like a "master"
back in the day, i was "pretty good"
with the advent of mmx/sse/etc, i am a total n00b   :bg

[FORTRANS]

Hi,

   Well there is some possibility that one can learn to do a
bit better if they stay at it.  Recently I went and looked at
some of my old code to revisit Sobel image processing.
One of the utilities I wrote back when was annoying me,
so I rewrote It.  Got about a 26x speedup.

   A lot of the code in the old books looked good until you
tried to use it.  The Waite Group's "MS-DOS Developer's
Guide" had a lot of good stuff, but some buggy code as
well.

   Others were too good, you had no real idea why they were
doing some things.  Holzner and Abrash come to mind.

   One of the best of the early books was "Assembly Language
Programming for the IBM Personal Computer" by David J.
Bradley, 1984.  Nice and clear discussion of the instruction
sets of the 8088 and 8087 for its time.

Regards,

Steve N.

[hutch--]

Bill,

> So what's your point, that we were all crappy coders back in the early to mid eighties ??

No, it was more a case in the pre-internet era that you rarely ever got to see the good stuff. It was not until the BBS era that you found much at all and only in the internet era that you found the masterpieces. I remember the leaked COMMAND>COM code from Microsoft was genuine class for 16 bit DOS code and the source for Keith Graham's BAT2EXEC was much the same.