“There is no stack [on the PDP-1]. For programmers used to working at a C level of abstraction or higher, this was very confusing for us at first. As mentioned above, macros look like functions when you write them, but when they are processed by the MACRO compiler they all get inlined. There is no stack pointer. There are no stack frames. Everything is just one big blob of data and instructions mushed together.
Owen Macindoe, GAMBIT: Investigating the Spacewar! Source
I don’t think I can convey to a non-programmer how frightening this is. It would be like trying to go through your day with Memento-style short-term memory loss. That these 1961 MIT hackers wrote a real video game under these constraints (and many others; read the article) is amazing.
(via eyepool)
The article’s description of the bit shifting techniques these mad programmers employed to get around the PDP-1’s limited memory is also pretty fascinating.
(via eyepool)
