January 21, 2012

Coding Anecdotes
Michael Schwarz's (@xwcg) talk this morning about updating his code editor reminded me of the fun and games my friends John Croucher (@johnnycroucher) and Antony Gouldsbrough (@agouldsbrough) had with coding in high school and beyond... But perhaps the most important person in these first few anecdotes was Mrs H, our high-school Computer Science teacher she started out as a Home Economics teacher, took a ONE-YEAR CS degree and was suddenly a CS teacher! Now, it was probably arrogant of us all at school to think that she wouldn't be very good at Computer Science but luckily for us, she wasn't very good at Computer Science. First up, John Croucher. He was working on a camera database, and had created a sizable file on floppy disk. However, it broke for some reason, and a couple of us quickly knocked up a program to get it copied safely from one disk to another and one of the computers at school (BBC Micros, for those wondering) had a double disk drive, so it was easy enough to get the info shoved over. Thing is, the data was being moved over so fast, block by block, that the dataaccess lights on the drives were flashing _very_ rapidly, and we knew Mrs H well enough to realise that if she were to see this happening even though it was utterly legitimate she would lose her proverbial shit. She did. It took a LOT of explaining by us for her to grasp that we were not actually trying to break school equipment...

Next anecdote relates to me. My computing project was MATHOFAX (couldnt you tell it was the Eighties?), a program to assist the Maths department with the tedious task of calculating, organising, sorting, tabulating and printing the GCSE test scores something which, these days, theyd be doing on a spreadsheet (and most likely are). Anyway, one of the most important components of the program was the need to actually print the scores, so I was going to need a ton of paper (you know, the old fan-fold variety with those perforations on the sides) to test the output. Mrs H wouldnt play ball which was silly, really so I asked another teacher instead: my form teacher, and good friend, Mrs Faulkner. Once I explained the situation to Mrs F, she was happy to let me have half a box of paper, and since it would be necessary to bring the box everydamnwhere with me during that school day until I got it home

(too big for a locker), I asked her to sign the lid to prove that I hadnt stolen it. Especially since I was going to be in Mrs Hs class later that day... I decided that I was going to have a little fun at Mrs Hs expense (because I am an evil bastard). I took my Physics textbook, removed the printer paper from the box, inserted the book, and replaced the paper. Voil full box of printer paper. I left the box at the front of the classroom (Mrs H wasnt in the room at that time) for the whole of the class it was Theory that day, so I knew it wouldnt be touched and prepared for when I left. At the end of the class, John, Antony and I left with the others, with Mrs H still present. I went up to the front of the classroom, calmly took the box, and walked past Mrs H. Bye, miss! I cheerfully called out with the box under my arm. What have you got in there??? Mrs H demanded to know. Printer paper, miss, I said, lifting up the lid to show her the seemingly-full box. As expected, she lost her shit. You cant take that from here!! Yes, I can, actually, I replied smugly, and showed her Mrs Fs signature on the box lid. Oh... er... okay, then... Like I said, Im a bastard XD

Anyway, theres an adjunct to this story. I found that, despite my best efforts, I couldnt get the printing part to work properly, which sucked. I was getting into a bit of a panic, because the score for my programming project would most likely suffer. So I took a mildly devious step: In the documentation for the program (where screenshots were required), I stated that the printing option was included for later expansion I scored 36 out of 40 for the project

The prize, though, for deviousness against Mrs H has to go to Antony Gouldsbrough. His programming project was to write a disassembler for the ZX Spectrum (aka the Timex 2000 if youre American). Now, the nature of the Z80 processors machine code resulted in there being instructions which took up one, two or three bytes in the code. For reasons unbeknownst to me, Antony decided that he would ignore the three-byte instructions a potentially disastrous move, because It wouldnt be able to disassemble most code;

We were required to show the thing actually working.

Antonys solution was delightfully devious: He wrote the disassembler entirely in 1and 2-byte instructions... so that the disassembler would have something to work on... itself. I think he got full marks...

My final anecdote leaves behind Mrs H (shes suffered enough, poor girl), and moves on to about 1991, and the days of the Commodore Amiga. The Atkins family were good friends of John Crouchers family, and they paid the Crouchers a visit one time, with their 13-year-old son, Kris. I was there at the time, and John and I were on the Amiga as usual. Kris (whom John said was a little insufferable) noted excitedly that we had an Amiga in front of us, and he exclaimed, Look what I made! So we gave him room to show off and he promptly grabbed the disk for the Red Sector Demo Maker, put together a short graphics demo with the pre-programmed parts, and proudly displayed it. This was like him saying hed built a computer himself from scratch, and then bringing out a PC his parents had bought him from the store, and plugging in the keyboard, mouse and monitor. Would you like to see what we made? I asked Kris innocently, when the demo was over. Okay! he replied. I fired up the program John and I had put together, using AMOS 3D yes, wed written it in BASIC, but it was an especially powerful one, and had a compiler to make your stuff run even faster. It was a short 3D, first-person POV, non-interactive demo: The camera moved forward towards a road, stopped, looked both ways and, seeing nothing was coming, begin to cross. Halfway across... BEEP, BEEP! You look up to see a car falling from the sky towards you. Just before the car smashes into you, the camera leaps backwards to show the car in its entirety, smashing into the ground, followed by a (ripped) sound sample: Ooooooh, I dont think he wanted to do that... By todays standards, it wouldnt impress the cat. But John and I had programmed it from scratch, and the look on Kris face was priceless as he left the room, stunned. Thanks for that, John said. I was wondering how we were going to shut him up.