Heyhey from Germany!

[forkhoister]

Hey Guys, I'm Dennis and I apologize in advance for my verbosity.
I suppose being in my mid-late 20s puts me in the newbie categorie around here but computers (mainly due to exposure through my techie dad) have accompanied me my whole life.
He graciously let me use his Thinkpad 700C (I still own) running DOS back in the day which is when I discovered my love for programming, particularlyl in Basic.
Inevitably, with modern high school life I fell somewhat out of touch with older hardware and just ran with whatever contemporary Windows OS was available on whatever desktop I've had at hand, with the occasional experiments in C++ (past aspirations in game development and whatnot hahaha).

Many, many years later, having now found myself in a webdev Backend Engineering position working within Unix environments I have finally found the peace and time to rediscover my interest in hardware architecture, spending my time learning more about electrical engineering and recently having finished building a simple 16-bit x86 breadboard "computer" from scratch. And whilst far from retro, I've come to fall in love with my TP T480 having tinkered with it myself to very small degrees (panel replacement etc.) Also trying to learn C for the purpose of compiler understanding/writing. Basically, I want to go from those high-level abstractions I use at work on a daily basis more and more low-level in my freetime because it's just plain fascinating how things used to be/and still often are engineered and work "under the hood".

So, to sum things up, I've discovered this forum through another blog during my research into the GRiDCASE laptop series of the 80s/90s of which I'm now in the active process of acquiring one and I hope to absorb as much knowledge here about old hardware as possible. (First time reading about Twister/Bubble Memory blew my damn mind hahah.)

Aside from my subpar self-taught tech know-how, I'm also an avid Kaiju movie fan, I like to go fishing, I actively take Piano classes. and I'm also interested in Marine Biology and Geology.

Kind regards and thanks for having me,
Dennis

 

[Papalapa]

Willkommen Dennis, it's hard to be a multitasking man as you...

 

[Zare]

Many, many years later, having now found myself in a webdev Backend Engineering position working within Unix environments I have finally found the peace and time to rediscover my interest in hardware architecture

This is what Unix does to a man

I know there's a world of internet knowledge but in a case you need specific help on the ecosystem of C/Unix feel free to drop me a PM.

Good luck with acquiring that laptop and welcome to the forums.
Zare

 

[forkhoister]

Willkommen Dennis, it's hard to be a multitasking man as you...

Moin, moin!! And yeah, you could maybe say that but I keep only a very small but close social circle so I have a lot of time at hand luckily(?!)

This is what Unix does to a man

I know there's a world of internet knowledge but in a case you need specific help on the ecosystem of C/Unix feel free to drop me a PM.

Good luck with acquiring that laptop and welcome to the forums.
Zare

Hey Zare, I'll absolutely keep that offer in mind! Actually, since we're already on it. I like doing things the "proper" way and I prefer books over online videos. So I did end up buying a phyical copy of "The C Programming Language" but I've noticed that Ansi-C differs quite a bit from what I'm seeing online in terms of syntax. Would you still reccommend it as a learning ressource or will I develop bad habits?
And thank you, I'm not in a rush for it, I can imagine it to be one of the rarer models but here's hoping.

 

[Zare]

It's a good book, it's worth reading over for historical perspective.

The ANSI C has been standardized to C89 and via ISO to C90 but the spec drafts existed since early 80s. There is still a lot of C89 code in a minimal Debian install for example. I think that's a good baseline to start at. There's decades of historical code and a ton of contemporary production grade open source too.

When you're at home with C ala C89 then you can move to reading C99 and above standards to just pick up the new features and see whether they bring anything useful to you.

 

[Brown]

Hello Dennis. Welcome to the forums!
Laptop 80s, rare computer.

 

[Wildfire]

Moin moin Dennis,

willkommen hier;
wenn Du im Unix Bereich unterwegs bist brauchst Du definitiv eine DEC PDP11 und eine Alpha für Digital Unix / Tru64 Unix ;-)

( If you are in the Unix Area you must have an DEC PDP11 and an Alpha for Digital Unix / Tru64 Unix for history reasons )

 

[forkhoister]

It's a good book, it's worth reading over for historical perspective.

The ANSI C has been standardized to C89 and via ISO to C90 but the spec drafts existed since early 80s. There is still a lot of C89 code in a minimal Debian install for example. I think that's a good baseline to start at. There's decades of historical code and a ton of contemporary production grade open source too.

When you're at home with C ala C89 then you can move to reading C99 and above standards to just pick up the new features and see whether they bring anything useful to you.

Alright then, thank you for the advice. I was just running into issues with the exercises a lot. It was making me write functions with function names that were later incorporated into the standard library so I would have constant compiler issues wondering what the heck I was doing wrong. But in that case, I'll keep reading.

Hello Dennis. Welcome to the forums!
Laptop 80s, rare computer.

Hey Brown, thank you! Rare yeah, but they do carry a lot of charm for some inexplicable reason haha. Can't stand how thin and frail my work-provided hardware feels.

Moin moin Dennis,

willkommen hier;
wenn Du im Unix Bereich unterwegs bist brauchst Du definitiv eine DEC PDP11 und eine Alpha für Digital Unix / Tru64 Unix ;-)

( If you are in the Unix Area you must have an DEC PDP11 and an Alpha for Digital Unix / Tru64 Unix for history reasons )

Heyhey, danke!!
And duly noted, might as well go all the way to the beginning and get a PDP-7. But I'm living in a 21m² space so there might be some accomodation issues but who needs bookshelf or a drawer anyways.