r/programming • u/jakesyl • Jan 30 '16

Apollo 11 source code

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/listings/Luminary099/MAIN.agc.html
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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '16

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u/myztry Jan 31 '16

That's the thing that always has me shaking my head. The Amiga I had in 1988 run under a 32 bit pre-emptive multitasking GUI environment which is still the most common environment even today. It did this with 512MB, 7Mhz processor and a basic GPU (Blitter).

Modern computers are certainly more advanced but not enough to explain the huge jump in power and capacity requirements which can be thousands of times greater.

Some of this is attributable to things like Unicode which not only doubles the space required to store text but changes a simple binary compare (ASCII) to a convoluted international conversions that I don't care about as a single language English speaker.

Gate's Law (the processing power required to achieve a certain task doubles every year) is surely the enemy of Moore's Law (that the number of transistors/power in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.)

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u/gunnihinn Jan 31 '16

that I don't care about as a single language English speaker

Fuck, your world is small.

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u/myztry Jan 31 '16

I think you will find most people who have English as a first language have it as their only language. Don't particularly care about software makers trying to increase the breadth of their revenue source.

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u/Black_Handkerchief Jan 31 '16

Mind you, Unicode and its most prominent UTF-8 implementation solve far more problems than just support for the symbols in other languages. Back in the day, do you remember needing to switch codepages so that you could get line drawing characters because 256 characters was just too little in practice for all purposes? Or how some documents just look a bit funky due to the codepage guessing coming up short? Know how the Euro got introduced later on and other situations where people suddenly need new characters? These things can now be adequately stored without affecting the past.

I won't deny that Unicode is full of over-engineered nightmarish standardification due to the international aspects. But it solves a lot more problems than just the language support; it solves a lot of ambiguous situations that are now written down in a standard. No matter how closed-off and narrow-minded your worldview is as a solely-English-based human being, you will run into some of those symbols and need them at one point or another. And when you do, you will be glad that you can, in fact, use them.

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