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Discussion on: What are you "old enough to remember" in software development?

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Ken Horovatin • Edited

I feel absolutely ancient reading these replies.

My first software development memory is using toggle switches on the front of my friend's newly-assembled ALTAIR 8800 to enter individual machine opcodes into its 256 bytes of memory.

We had to hand-compile assembly code to get the opcodes.

It was exciting when we finally upgraded the memory and had Altair 4K BASIC (by "Micro-Soft") to write in a "high level language". Still had to hand-toggle the boot loader in before we could load the BASIC interpreter from cassette tape, though.