About PrimeCoder and me.

Hi, i am Ruben Knuijver (difficult to pronounce) so, a.k.a. Prime is just fine, I am a Coder, a sr. software architect, and working in research and development, also a programmer in heart and soul. Teaching others and learn new things everyday. When i was a young boy, I started fiddling around with code. In the late '80s, I got my hands on a Commodore 64, and a FinalCartrige III and a Power Cartrige. From that point I was not bound Peek and Poke around in BASIC, I had access to the language of this machine with Assembler Monitor. Now that I gained this new power, I had to learn and understand it's use.

For days on end I would hack my way into the machine, see the innerworking of all the applications, demos and games I owned. Also tediously typed datablocks that I used to write in BASIC before, that could span hundreds of lines, and failures were hard to find.

  
    10 DATA 237, 23, 341, 0, 0, 0
  

Versus C64 Assembly

  
    0100 LDA $0120, X
    0103 STA $05E0, X
    0106 INX
  

Only a few years later, early '90s, I got my first PC, a Intel 368SX 16Mhz with MS-DOS. I wondered, would there be a similar way to interact with this machine. This felt like a long journey, I tried many things and not alway with great success. It had a text editor (Edit), that kindly showed me the content of every file (mostly unreadable gibberish.) But .exe files started with MZ and other types of similar content.
We didn't have Internet back than, so I had to go on knowledge of other people have that I knew or met somewhere. A really short list at that moment in time. In 1994, my first job in a computer shop, is where I met some great guys. One of whom pointed me to "DEBUG.COM", yes it was game on!

  
    xxxx:0100 8CC8    MOV   AX,CS  <- Keep Stack in CS Segment.
    xxxx:0102 8ED0    MOV   SS,AX  <- The key instruction!
    xxxx:0104 B074    MOV   AL,73  <- Could be almost anything.
    xxxx:0106 90      NOP
    xxxx:0107 90      NOP
  

Really awesome, as they gave me a floppy disk with "TASM" Turbo Assembler, and a box with "Borland Turbo Pascal". Assembler is one of my all time favorites, even today.

  
    .model small
    .stack	100h
    .data
    msg	db "Merry Christmas!",'$'
    .code
    main	proc
      mov ax, SEG msg
      mov	ds, ax
      mov	dx, offset msg
      mov	ah, 9
      int	21h
      mov	ax, 4c00h
      int	21h
    main	endp
    end	main
  

As time went on, I got to learn VC++, Delphi and principles like 'OO' and Functional, design patterns. All still pre-Internet for me, All by books from an actual library with limited matter on this subject, and only having some friends around whom I could ask for help.

This is all a BIG difference with today, Internet access and a whole new enrty level to programming. Faster computers, more and more languages, communities and open-source (open-source would be like using curse words in a church)

To be continued...