[Coco] CoCo 128-column text mode

[Steven Hirsch]

On Thu, 8 Jan 2015, Allen Huffman wrote:

> Steve Gipson at GRC.com (the guy who coined the term spyware and does 
> the excellent Security Now podcast) is the only modern author I know 
> that still writes all his PC stuff in assembly... Thus, they will be 
> like 40K instead of 50GB. Amazing.

If you are optimizing for _size_, then I can sort of see it.  However, 
it still begs the question of why bother in this day and age of huge 
memory and disk storage capabilities?

All that said, I enjoy assembly coding immensely.  I'm currently helping 
out on a project that uses the PRU units on a BeagleBone Black SBC to code 
and decode hard drive MFM data.  The PRUs have no cache, interrupt 
handling or a stack - 100% deterministic timing!  Most serious 
applications require cycle-counting, so ASM is the only way to go here. 
Took a while to get used to the architecture, but it's really very cool. I 
cannot believe how much sophistication is squeezed into the TI ARM-8 
variant used on the BBB.


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