• sloonark@lemm.ee
    English
    15·
    2 years ago

    I’m a high school teacher and I recently was discussing this. Protip: don’t talk to 14 year olds about how if something is in between hard and soft, it’s firm. 🙄

  • kog@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    Firmware is just software that runs in a different place.

    Source: me, I write firmware sometimes at work.

    • Ends@feddit.deEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      200+ Shareware games on a CD, played the shit outta those. And they came in magazines or were given out completely free.

      I believe demos for games should still be the norm.

      • J.M.@lemmy.ca
        English
        1·
        2 years ago

        And they arrived (because I don’t want to use ‘came’ given this thread already) on cereal boxes.

        • Ends@feddit.deEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          I had never heard of that around here (Germany). Got my first PC '99, so I should have noticed; was looking everywhere for cheap Software deals. But there were some other companies which gave out free CD-ROMs as advertising with shareware and demo games. Some of those games were never finished, lol.

          The Internet Archive has those Nestlé CDs btw :)

          • J.M.@lemmy.ca
            English
            0·
            2 years ago

            Happened in Canada for sure. The post made me go dig through boxes in the basement and try to remember where my old cdrom drive and cable that would connect to a new Mac would be found. Good times and worth it.

            • Ends@feddit.deEnglish
              0·
              2 years ago

              Got no “vintage” hardware sadly. In a VM it’s not the same. I still have a Floppy drive, but those disks were all corrupted eons ago. I wonder how long my heaps of gamer magazine and bundle-box (bought at Aldi for practically nothing _) CDs are still gonna last…

              They were the best of times, that’s for sure!

      • WarmSoda@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        I think demos are coming back. I have a bunch on steam recently, and Nintendo has a ton of them on thier storefront.

    • Odo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Oh man, Doom. Getting 1/3 of the whole game was incredible. Also Deus Ex years later. Some people hated the Ellis Island level, but I spent so much time exploring everywhere.

      • Ends@feddit.deEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        I fucked around so long that I failed the mission. It gave a prompt that I had 17 minutes left to do the last thing, and ran out by 20 seconds or sth.

        Gotta give that game a whirl again soon, with proper textures & mods & fool around with ReShade for hours until my back hurts and I gotta lay down after an hour of actual gameplay, muhaha.

  • NewAgeOldPerson@reddthat.com
    English
    1·
    2 years ago

    Started computer science in grade school with only an hour of actual computer time a week. A LOT of theory and history. Charles Babbage, Ada, ENIAC, etc.

    This stuff was drilled into our heads. Same with bit, byte and, halfway between bit and byte, a nibble. It’s a thing. 4 bits is a nibble.

    Funny enough, I couldn’t code to save my life now.

    • evranch@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Nibbles are still a thing in embedded programming and in ultra low bandwidth comms like LoRa. For example you can pack 2 BCD digits into a byte, one for the high nibble and one for the low nibble. This results in the hex representation of the byte actually being directly readable as the two digits, which is convenient.

      Datasheet for sensors will sometimes reference nibbles as well, often for status bits on protocols like Onewire where every bit counts. i.e low nibble contains a state value 0-15 and high nibble contains individual alarm flags.

      • player_entity_t@lemmy.world
        English
        0·
        2 years ago

        QBasic came with NIBBLES.BAS, a snake game using text-mode characters as “pixels”. Specifically it faked a 80x50 “pixel” grid using the standard 80x25 text screen where each 8-bit (=1 byte) text character made up two monochrome pixels using ▄ or ▀ or █ or an empty space.

        I assume the name derived from the fact that, in a way, one pixel was “using half a byte”, i. e. a nibble.

      • phx@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Nibbles can also be used with image types that are less than 8-bit

  • fubo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    By the way, “joystick” was kinda rude back in the day, but nobody even notices now.

  • Lachy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I thought this was common knowledge. I distinctly remember this being taught in a basic high school computing class back in the 90’s.

    • Doug [he/him]English
      0·
      2 years ago

      So in the 90s I had different computer based classes in high school.

      There was a “computers” class, which is probably the closest to what you’re talking about, in which we mostly learned how to use Microsoft Works.

      I also was fortunate enough to have some programming classes. We started out with QBasic and then the more advanced level was visual basic.

      None of these discussed firmware. If it came up at all it was probably a casual side conversation because someone bricked something trying to update it.

        • Doug [he/him]English
          0·
          2 years ago

          I did have a classmate try to replicate Simon in QBasic but he kept needing the input reversed.

          I told him the “feature not a bug” line and suggested he call it NOMIS

          • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            2 years ago

            Had to look that up - seen it before but never played. Sorry for the late reaction, lemmy.world had enough server problems that I didn’t see my notifications in > 2 weeks…

            • Doug [he/him]English
              0·
              2 years ago

              No worries. Lemmy feels way more casual than Reddit anyway and I got notifications for months old comments there from time to time

              • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
                0·
                2 years ago

                Now if only I could find a way to open - from my notification about your response - your comment in the context of the community - but on my own instance. I have tried clicking on “Show context” -> links to the home server of the community, where I can not post / respond. Clicking anywhere else:

                • Username: takes me to your profile
                • Community: takes me to my instance’s view of the community in which we are communicating
                • Post name: takes me to my instance’s view of the thread in which we are communicating, but of course without context to the comment
                • link symbol: does nothing
                • Show context: see above, takes me to the correct place, on the wrong instance
                • Timestamp: does nothing

                :(

                Anyways, I like lemmy a lot, but I think with the recent nasty defederation announcement at lemmy.world from hexbear I’ll have to find another instance as home…

                • Doug [he/him]English
                  0·
                  2 years ago

                  FWIW I home at midwest.social. It’s not strictly for the Midwest US but you’ll see a lot of stuff for that region there. It’s also left leaning and I think the only instances they’ve defederated so far have been for extremism.

                  I’m also using jerboa on my phone and from my inbox there’s a speech bubble button which lets me make this response from my inbox.

                  I don’t know if either of these things will help you but I figured I’d offer them just in case they did.