07_10_87/T\OSB00

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07_10_87/T\OSB00

This website contains an archive of files for the Acorn Electron, BBC Micro, Acorn Archimedes, Commodore 16 and Commodore 64 computers, which Dominic Ford has rescued from his private collection of floppy disks and cassettes.

Some of these files were originally commercial releases in the 1980s and 1990s, but they are now widely available online. I assume that copyright over them is no longer being asserted. If you own the copyright and would like files to be removed, please contact me.

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Filename:	07_10_87/T\OSB00
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File size:	2542 bytes
Load address:	0000
Exec address:	0000

Duplicates

There is 1 duplicate copy of this file in the archive:

CEEFAX disks » telesoftware2.adl » 07_10_87/T\OSB00
CEEFAX disks » telesoftware2.adl » 26_09_87/T\OSB00

File contents

THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING

A preface to an exploration of the BBC Micro at Machine
level.

by Programmer

............................................................


Introduction:

For the next six months Telesoftware will be transmitting a
weekly series of files in the series OSBITS, literally
Operating System Bits, in which I will take you on an
exploration of the world under the lid of your BBC Micro. 
It's a bit like looking under the bonnet of a car, indeed I
started off calling this project 'Under the Bonnet'.

I hope to do two things.  Firstly to help you understand and
program in assembler and so in machine code.  You might want
to do this because it means you can write faster programs,
or smaller programs, or do things you just cannot do from
BASIC.  You might want to do so simply as an intellectual
challenge.

I don't claim that I'll be the world's best teacher of
assembler.  I hope you will get yourself a book and find
some help in that too.  I know from bitter experience that a
one sided view of a subject is not always the best view from
which to learn.  Since I only recently explored some of the
areas I'll take you through myself I hope I can explain the
pitfalls more clearly.  I also want to generate some of the
excitement of machine level programming, so besides helping
you through binary and stuff like that I shall give you
simple programs to play around with from the very start.

The second thing I want to do is teach you something of how
the BBC operating system is designed to help you program. 
I'll explain how to use OSBYTES and OSWORDS and other
OScalls and show how you can bend the OS to do what you want
to do by intercepting parts of it.

Finally there should be room for this project to be
interactive.  If you like what I'm doing tell me, it'll spur
me on.  If you don't like it then tell my why.  I may not be
able to reply individually but I will take note.

Off we go then.  A bit of light relief to start with a text
only module with some historical background to computers and
computing.


...........................................................


The History of Computing in 1200 words approx


The dictionary says that a computer is a reckoner, an
electronic machine that makes calculations or controls
operations that can be expressed in numerical or logical
terms.  If you are reading this you almost certainly have a
micro-computer of your own but you will equally certainly
not have had one for more than 10 years and probably much
less.  In fact as little as fifteen years ago most people's
idea of a computer, gained from science fiction TV
programmes like 'A for Andromeda', was of a room full of
machinery with tape drives that buzzed and printers that
clattered.  You communicated with the computer by using a
typewriter.  Indeed when I went to university in 1969 the
IBM main frame computer that my engineering department used
was just like this.  But then I took a slide rule with me!

Broadly speaking computers as we understand them today owe
their origins to events back as far as the 17th century. 
The first adding machine was probably built in 1623 by
Wilhelm Schikard in Tubingen in the south of Germany, but
the earliest surviving one is a "Pascaline" built by Blaise
Pascal in Rouen in France in 1642.  There is an example of
one in the Science Museum in London.  (Yes, the Pascal after
whom the language was named.)

In 1674 Gottfried Leibniz wrote a mathematical paper about
an arithmetic using only 1s and 0s.  This was the probable
birth of binary maths.

The economist Adam Smith, writing in 1776, is credited with
the idea that any complex task could be broken down into a
series of simple operations.  These could be divided among
several workers.  In 1784 the post-revolutionary government
in France decided to decimalise the circle, dividing a right
angle into 100 grades instead of 90 degrees.  Because of
this they had to calculate new sets of mathematical tables. 
Taking notice of Smith's ideas they used teams of operators
with each person performing a simple part of the
calculations.  (The French were fanatical about
decimalisation.  Some of their ideas caught on, and remain
as the metric system, whereas others, like this circle
business and a decimal calendar, did not.)

Many people say that the Victorian, Charles Babbage, was the
first person to attempt to design a computer.  He first
designed a machine which would calculate and print out
mathematical tables, called his 'Difference Engine'.  But he
had also heard of the method of controlling silk looms
perfected by Joseph Marie Jacquard.  This used holes in
cards to control the patterns produced on the loom.  So in
1834, Babbage put forward the idea of a mechanical computer
with its instructions stored on cards.  If it hadn't been
for the difficulty of engineering the cogs and levers for
Babbage's 'Analytical Engine', as it was called, the
Victorians would have seen the development of a steam
powered computer.

Jacquard's loom was also the inspiration behind a punch card
data processing machine invented by an American named Herman
Hollerith for the US Census of 1890.  It sorted the cards on
the basis of the holes in them, with each hole denoting some
piece of statistical information.  Hollerith formed a
company called the Tabulating Machine Company which then,
after a couple of amalgamations, became the Computing
Tabulating Recording Company which in 1924 renamed itself
International Business Machines.  (So there could have been
a CTRC PC!)

Possibly the single most important theoretical work that led
to computing was a paper by Alan Turing in 1936 which
described a machine that could move along a tape, backwards
and forwards, following a set of rules governing its
reaction to marks on the tape.  The rules could make it
modify the marks after reading them and a universal Turing
machine, where the rules of behaviour are also marked on the
tape is nothing less than a computer following a program.

So the principles for automated calculating and data
processing were well established by the time the second
world war brought into being an electronic computer.  It was
called Colossus and was used by British Intelligence to help
break German codes, notably Ultra.  Typically it remained
top secret for many years after the war, so that computing
research continued without its help.  (In fact several
Colossi were built in time for D-Day.)

Initially the British work, in Cambridge and Manchester, was
directed towards producing a few large machines that would
satisfy the entire national need for computing.  The
Americans, spurred on by the war but also by business
interests, were working along similar lines.  The early
machines were a mixed and variegated bunch.  Some, like
ENIAC, calculated in decimal using special valves designed
with 10 logic states.  One giant American machine used
electrical relays.  It was called the Harvard Mark I and as
it calculated it sounded like a roomful of people knitting.

Most early computers had a single program permanently wired
into them. Whatever information was fed into them they could
only deal with it in one way.  Eventually it was realised
that you could give the computer instructions about what to
do with information in the same way you gave it the
information, for instance on punched cards or through a
typewriter keyboard.  The first computer to run with a
program given to it in this way, rather than a hard-wired
one, was the Manchester University Mark I in 1948.  Like all
the early electronic computers it used valves.

Valves were big, unreliable, used lots of power and gave out
heat.  When the transistor arrived on the scene it was
smaller, used less electricity, was more reliable and cooler
than the valve it replaced, so it proved very useful to the
computer makers.  But even the invention of the transistor
was not the key to computing for everyone.  That only
happened when it became possible to build whole integrated
circuits into the wafers of the same material that was used
to make transistors.  This is what is now known as the
microchip or "chip". The first computer on a chip, called a
microprocessor, was marketed in 1971.

The early computers were programmed initially by arranging
the wiring or by laboriously entering machine code numbers
into memory locations by hand.  In 1957 IBM brought out the
first programming language, FORTRAN.  It stands for FORmula
TRANslation and is still used widely in scientific and
technical computing.  It was the first computer language I
learned.  BASIC is a child of FORTRAN.  The oldest
languages, FORTRAN, COBOL and ALGOL as well as the more
recent Pascal are still used but newly developed languages
like ADA, Modula 2 and C have gained ground.  Each language
has its fans and each language has its main application.

Computers have become more and more powerful as time has
gone on.  New techniques have arrived like parallel
processing that promise yet more powerful machines. Not yet
'intelligent' machines but nonetheless useful ones. The
greatest irony has been that speed limiting factors have
made the most powerful computers small.  The 'brains the
size of a planet' of science fiction would be useless
because the information transfer around the machine is
limited by the speed of light.

Over the next six months I'll be showing you how you can
program your BBC Micro in its own language, 6502 machine
code.  Your micro is more powerful than most of the machines
described above, so let's get the most out of it.

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*
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*
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000020a0  35 37 20 49 42 4d 20 62  72 6f 75 67 68 74 20 6f  |57 IBM brought o|
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00002190  20 6f 6c 64 65 73 74 0d  6c 61 6e 67 75 61 67 65  | oldest.language|
000021a0  73 2c 20 46 4f 52 54 52  41 4e 2c 20 43 4f 42 4f  |s, FORTRAN, COBO|
000021b0  4c 20 61 6e 64 20 41 4c  47 4f 4c 20 61 73 20 77  |L and ALGOL as w|
000021c0  65 6c 6c 20 61 73 20 74  68 65 20 6d 6f 72 65 0d  |ell as the more.|
000021d0  72 65 63 65 6e 74 20 50  61 73 63 61 6c 20 61 72  |recent Pascal ar|
000021e0  65 20 73 74 69 6c 6c 20  75 73 65 64 20 62 75 74  |e still used but|
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00002250  61 6e 73 20 61 6e 64 20  65 61 63 68 20 6c 61 6e  |ans and each lan|
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00002270  69 6e 20 61 70 70 6c 69  63 61 74 69 6f 6e 2e 0d  |in application..|
00002280  0d 43 6f 6d 70 75 74 65  72 73 20 68 61 76 65 20  |.Computers have |
00002290  62 65 63 6f 6d 65 20 6d  6f 72 65 20 61 6e 64 20  |become more and |
000022a0  6d 6f 72 65 20 70 6f 77  65 72 66 75 6c 20 61 73  |more powerful as|
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000022d0  65 73 20 68 61 76 65 20  61 72 72 69 76 65 64 20  |es have arrived |
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000022f0  6f 63 65 73 73 69 6e 67  20 74 68 61 74 20 70 72  |ocessing that pr|
00002300  6f 6d 69 73 65 20 79 65  74 20 6d 6f 72 65 20 70  |omise yet more p|
00002310  6f 77 65 72 66 75 6c 20  6d 61 63 68 69 6e 65 73  |owerful machines|
00002320  2e 20 4e 6f 74 20 79 65  74 0d 27 69 6e 74 65 6c  |. Not yet.'intel|
00002330  6c 69 67 65 6e 74 27 20  6d 61 63 68 69 6e 65 73  |ligent' machines|
00002340  20 62 75 74 20 6e 6f 6e  65 74 68 65 6c 65 73 73  | but nonetheless|
00002350  20 75 73 65 66 75 6c 20  6f 6e 65 73 2e 20 54 68  | useful ones. Th|
00002360  65 0d 67 72 65 61 74 65  73 74 20 69 72 6f 6e 79  |e.greatest irony|
00002370  20 68 61 73 20 62 65 65  6e 20 74 68 61 74 20 73  | has been that s|
00002380  70 65 65 64 20 6c 69 6d  69 74 69 6e 67 20 66 61  |peed limiting fa|
00002390  63 74 6f 72 73 20 68 61  76 65 0d 6d 61 64 65 20  |ctors have.made |
000023a0  74 68 65 20 6d 6f 73 74  20 70 6f 77 65 72 66 75  |the most powerfu|
000023b0  6c 20 63 6f 6d 70 75 74  65 72 73 20 73 6d 61 6c  |l computers smal|
000023c0  6c 2e 20 20 54 68 65 20  27 62 72 61 69 6e 73 20  |l.  The 'brains |
000023d0  74 68 65 0d 73 69 7a 65  20 6f 66 20 61 20 70 6c  |the.size of a pl|
000023e0  61 6e 65 74 27 20 6f 66  20 73 63 69 65 6e 63 65  |anet' of science|
000023f0  20 66 69 63 74 69 6f 6e  20 77 6f 75 6c 64 20 62  | fiction would b|
00002400  65 20 75 73 65 6c 65 73  73 0d 62 65 63 61 75 73  |e useless.becaus|
00002410  65 20 74 68 65 20 69 6e  66 6f 72 6d 61 74 69 6f  |e the informatio|
00002420  6e 20 74 72 61 6e 73 66  65 72 20 61 72 6f 75 6e  |n transfer aroun|
00002430  64 20 74 68 65 20 6d 61  63 68 69 6e 65 20 69 73  |d the machine is|
00002440  0d 6c 69 6d 69 74 65 64  20 62 79 20 74 68 65 20  |.limited by the |
00002450  73 70 65 65 64 20 6f 66  20 6c 69 67 68 74 2e 0d  |speed of light..|
00002460  0d 4f 76 65 72 20 74 68  65 20 6e 65 78 74 20 73  |.Over the next s|
00002470  69 78 20 6d 6f 6e 74 68  73 20 49 27 6c 6c 20 62  |ix months I'll b|
00002480  65 20 73 68 6f 77 69 6e  67 20 79 6f 75 20 68 6f  |e showing you ho|
00002490  77 20 79 6f 75 20 63 61  6e 0d 70 72 6f 67 72 61  |w you can.progra|
000024a0  6d 20 79 6f 75 72 20 42  42 43 20 4d 69 63 72 6f  |m your BBC Micro|
000024b0  20 69 6e 20 69 74 73 20  6f 77 6e 20 6c 61 6e 67  | in its own lang|
000024c0  75 61 67 65 2c 20 36 35  30 32 20 6d 61 63 68 69  |uage, 6502 machi|
000024d0  6e 65 0d 63 6f 64 65 2e  20 20 59 6f 75 72 20 6d  |ne.code.  Your m|
000024e0  69 63 72 6f 20 69 73 20  6d 6f 72 65 20 70 6f 77  |icro is more pow|
000024f0  65 72 66 75 6c 20 74 68  61 6e 20 6d 6f 73 74 20  |erful than most |
00002500  6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 6d  61 63 68 69 6e 65 73 0d  |of the machines.|
00002510  64 65 73 63 72 69 62 65  64 20 61 62 6f 76 65 2c  |described above,|
00002520  20 73 6f 20 6c 65 74 27  73 20 67 65 74 20 74 68  | so let's get th|
00002530  65 20 6d 6f 73 74 20 6f  75 74 20 6f 66 20 69 74  |e most out of it|
00002540  2e 0d                                             |..|
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