Yeah, I am almost identical, lots of 6805, floating point routines and bit banging RS232, all in much less than 2k code memory, making functional products.
Things like basketball scorebaords, or tractor spray controllers to make uniform application of herbicide regardless of speed. Made in a small suburben factory in batches of a hundred or so, by half a dozen to a dozen "unksilled" young ladies, who were actally quite skilled.
No internet, the odd book and magazines, rest of it, work it out yourself.
In those days it was still acceptable, if not mandatory to use whatever trick you could come up with to save some memory.
It didn't matter about the direct readability, though we always took great pains in the comments for the non obvious, including non specified addressing modes and the like.
This was around the time the very first blue LEDS came out.
When the web came along, and all the frameworks etc, it just never felt right to be relying on arbitrary code someone else wrote and you did not know the pedigree of.
Or had at least paid for so that you had someone to hassle if it was not doing what you expected and had some sort of warranty.
But also a lot of closed source and libraries you paid for if you wanted to rely on someone elses code and needed to save time or do something special, an awful lot compared to today.
Microsoft C was something like $3000 (maybe $5k, cant rememeber exactly) dollars from memory, at a time when that would buy a decent second hand car and a young engineer might be getting 20-25k a year tops(AUD).
Turbo C was a total breakthru, and 286 was the PC of choice, with 20MB hard drive, with the Compaq 386-20 just around the corner.
Still, I wouldn't go back when I look at my current 11th Gen Intel CPU with 32Gig RAM, 2 x 1TB SSDs and a 1080Ti graphics card with multiple 55inch 4k monitors, not even dreamable at the time.
Things like basketball scorebaords, or tractor spray controllers to make uniform application of herbicide regardless of speed. Made in a small suburben factory in batches of a hundred or so, by half a dozen to a dozen "unksilled" young ladies, who were actally quite skilled.
No internet, the odd book and magazines, rest of it, work it out yourself.
In those days it was still acceptable, if not mandatory to use whatever trick you could come up with to save some memory.
It didn't matter about the direct readability, though we always took great pains in the comments for the non obvious, including non specified addressing modes and the like.
This was around the time the very first blue LEDS came out.
When the web came along, and all the frameworks etc, it just never felt right to be relying on arbitrary code someone else wrote and you did not know the pedigree of.
Or had at least paid for so that you had someone to hassle if it was not doing what you expected and had some sort of warranty.
But also a lot of closed source and libraries you paid for if you wanted to rely on someone elses code and needed to save time or do something special, an awful lot compared to today.
Microsoft C was something like $3000 (maybe $5k, cant rememeber exactly) dollars from memory, at a time when that would buy a decent second hand car and a young engineer might be getting 20-25k a year tops(AUD).
Turbo C was a total breakthru, and 286 was the PC of choice, with 20MB hard drive, with the Compaq 386-20 just around the corner.
Still, I wouldn't go back when I look at my current 11th Gen Intel CPU with 32Gig RAM, 2 x 1TB SSDs and a 1080Ti graphics card with multiple 55inch 4k monitors, not even dreamable at the time.