Today in an Object Oriented Analysis and Design Class (yes I'm a trainer), I was reminded why I fell in love with code.
In the mid to late 80's, I attended Oklahoma State University trying to earn an Electrical Engineering degree with a Computer Option (a comp sci minor). For the first three years, my programming labs were completely against mid-range and mainframe systems. Despite having access to TRS-80's (yes the model 1 with the tape drive and 4k RAM) and Apples in Secondary Ed, I discovered programming against the large systems was not a lot of fun.
Then I got to take a Micro Computer Course. Part of the course required us to learn Assembler in labs. Praise the Maker! We got access to some TI 8088 systems.
Near the end of the semster we were required to come up with a major project and implement it in Assembler against these TIs. Because of my love for math (yes I worked toward a Math Minor as well), I decided to do the old favorite Pythagoras Theorem . Yet my lab instructor said I could not do it since the 8088 did not do floating point processing.
A CHALLENGE!!!!
So I spoke to my professor and he said I risked a large portion of my grade. Fine! I'll do it!
To bring the story to a close....Thanks to the old CRC book, I found an equation (wish I remembered the name) which would allow me to iterate through several integer calculations and generate a solution to the 25 decimal point. I could have gone farther....but why!
I got the A. Yet more importantly I got the addiction of Microcomputer progamming!
How did you get addicted?