this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Programmer Humor

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[–] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 87 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It was even worse, they manually flipped toggle switches to write the program

[–] IHeartBadCode@kbin.social 39 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For anyone interested. Here’s a video of programming an EEPROM with dip switches and using it to drive a seven segment display.

The guy’s channel also includes how to build a very simple computer using various ICs. If breadboard computers are your kind of thing.

[–] gvasco@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 1 year ago

Love Ben Eater and his projects. Helped me understand lots about how a computer functions under the hood with his 8bit computer project.

[–] Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago

That was great, thanks for sharing:)

[–] akash_rawal@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Hikermick@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah they looked like old timey telephone operators and the people who did it were called computers

[–] tias@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 year ago

And there was no space or enter.

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

I bet most people reading your comment will think it's a joke. 😩 And thanks for bringing back up those nightmares.

[–] cloudy1999@sh.itjust.works 39 points 1 year ago

The binary says 'Meme'

[–] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 27 points 1 year ago

Nah. They punched cards.

(Too bad shittywatercolors is not on lemmy)

[–] Phoenix3875@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

Yeah, with USB and chips. Sounds about right.

[–] CookieJarObserver@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Binary is just morse in Mashine readable Form.

[–] Cruxifux@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

I was gonna say “like, kind of” because of Morse code.

Ya beat me to it bro

[–] jungle@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not really, Morse code is not binary, but tertiary.

[–] fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm guessing you're saying that because of the pauses? Otherwise I don't get it.

[–] jungle@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, the space is a necessary symbol in Morse code, otherwise it's impossible to decode.

[–] fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Makes sense. I remember asking myself whether Morse was a form of Huffman encoding back when I was learning that stuff. And it kinda is going for that, but without actually doing it properly since it wasn't a binary code per se and so could use the pauses. "Ternary" makes sense.

[–] jungle@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Right, Morse was actually mentioned as an example when I was learning Huffman encoding. :)

[–] BlackRose 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd say it's quinary but can easily be represented binarily

  1. short mark, dot or dit ( ▄ ): 1

  2. longer mark, dash or dah ( ▄▄▄ ): 111

  3. intra-character gap (between the dits and dahs within a character): 0

  4. short gap (between letters): 000

  5. medium gap (between words): 0000000

[–] jungle@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can do it with three symbols:

  1. Dot: 10
  2. Dash: 1110
  3. Gap: 00

The long gap between words is just three short gaps.

There's a Vsauce video about this: https://youtu.be/HY_OIwideLg

[–] BlackRose 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Looks right, but would that not already be optimized?

[–] jungle@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not sure what you mean by optimized.

[–] BlackRose 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Optimized to use less symbols by combining them (long gap between words is just three short gaps). I also think if a sentence ends, there would be the unnessecary 0 from the dots and Dashes at the end.

[–] jungle@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that extra 0 also irks me, it's the typical issue when concatenating words, that requires a trim() at the end.

But it's not an issue in terms of showing that you need three symbols to represent Morse code.

[–] Lowered_lifted@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Unless I'm mistaken I would say that it's the other way around, Morse code is more like a human readable machine language expressed in binary because the 26 character alphabet is expressed in different binary values, much like ASCII.

Finally, a keyboard to program brainfuck

[–] sgtnasty@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago

This picture is basically true. The old punch cards ...

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] BlackRose 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] RotiKuningas@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago
[–] nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What's "space!" and "enter"?

For those that need help in deciphering the title text, there is a super easy trick: Take the last 5 bits of each byte, convert them from binary to decimal, and that letter of the alphabet (starting from one) is the letter represented by the ASCII code.

To convert binary numbers to decimal, just add the place values of a the 1s together. For 5 bits, the place values are 16, 8, 4, 2, 1. So 10110 becomes 16+4+2 which is equal to 22.

01001101: last 5 bits are 01101, in decimal, that is 8+4+1=13, and the 13th letter of the alphabet is "m"

01100101, becomes 00101, then 4+1=5, and the 5th letter of the alphabet is 'e'

The last 2 are just repeats of those, so the post body reads "meme" (if the third bit is zero, the letter is capital, so it should really be "Meme")

[–] little_hoarse@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

Technically morse code is just on/off on/off lol

[–] Lowered_lifted@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

This is a weird meme to me. Have you ever made something like a simple accumulator machine out of logic gates, OP? You literally just program them in binary, although usually the instructions are expressed in hexadecimal. You make your own instruction set. When we did ours in Compsci foundations I just decided that 0x06 was going to be my jump at negative instruction. I could have wired the logic so that instruction was at a different value, it's literally possible to make your own instruction set, then your own assembly language, and then your own compiler, and your own programming language. People, mostly women at first, did this for every new computer their institution built at first.

[–] aidan@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Having a space character makes it ternary. If enter is a character than quaternary

[–] sarmale@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 year ago

This is what I imagined programators did when i was a kid

[–] Leobm@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago