The other day, I was reading Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success
Anyway, James discussed a book, 6502 Assembly Language Programming, that his father gave him so he could write low-level programs for his Apple II. ( Yep, this was a while ago. ) James also explained what this book meant to him and how it changed his life.
Here is that book for me:
Circa 1985. This was the one that started it all. I absolutely devoured the contents of this book to the point that it basically fell apart. It told me everything that I needed to know about how a PC worked on the inside. That was a really big deal back then and I used that book for years doing everything from assembly language, to BASIC, to Turbo Pascal, to WordPerfect macros.
I sold most of my early computer programming books back in the mid-90’s so I no longer have much from my early programming days. But, while reading James’ book I remembered just how fun that book was and how it made me feel, and I got all nostalgic. I tracked one down on Amazon.com and for a mere $8 plus shipping, it again resides in my library.
Yee ha!
Loading ...
Ah, "the pink shirt book".
Reading it always gave me those "how does one guy know all this stuff?" moments. I always like this cover too – smart shirt and tie, but a bit crumpled like he just pulled another all-nighter coding something, then stuck the tie back on in the morning when the photographer turned up. It made him "one of us" rather than some faceless nerd looking on down on those of us less worthy.
Of course, the name Peter Norton will mean almost nothing to many of the young bucks these days, even tose that use software which still bears his name. How things move on…
Adam,
Peter did what just about every geek dreams of doing: he wrote some software, made a few bucks ( probably a lot ), wrote a bunch of books, then retired to do whatever else he wanted.
I'm still trying to decide if the IT/developer world was more fun then, or more fun now.
Mitch