Comment Why is it necessary to reverse engineer this? (Score 1) 167
I think all first year computer science / programming / engineering students should be introduced to this and learn how to write programs for this environment first before moving on to modern systems. True power is being able to write useful stuff with only 64kb of ram and 1mhz of processor, and have it run in an acceptable time frame, and taking those skills and scaling up today's multi-core/ multi-gigahertz/multi-gigabyte address spaces.
While I agree, I wonder if this is actually true. To what extend does knowledge about efficient coding on an 8 bit machine with limited memory teach us anything about programming these heftier CPUs? Maybe the only people that should really have chewed the bits are the writers of compilers. For all others it might not matter so much how the compiler and the OS handle memory allocations and the like, and it may be more useful to focus on the program structure instead of the implementation on the CPU.