dennis@home wrote:


"Jules Richardson" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:54:48 +0100, geoff wrote:
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.

Joined up the dots, did you dennis?

Sheet of paper and a crayon. Oh, and a chewable reference manual.

The reference manuals not much good when it hasn't been written yet.

Or when the devices don't actually do what's in the book because they
suffer from ground bounce inside the package.

Or even have leaky silicon so the bias drifts over time until the device
stops working. Or at least stops working until you power it off and get
it sent back as a faulty unit only for it to be fully functional when
you try and find the problem.

Then there are little things like actually connecting microprocessors to
hardware which are never in the manuals. Just little things like setup
and hold times, the odd race condition, etc. Things geof doesn't even
know exists.

hell, even things nobody knows about and you just have to find it and
fix it.

Oh I can assure you that some of us did, although by that time I was
glad to leave it to the sweaty oiks on the hardware emuls. I had had
enough of hardware by that time, and software paid more.

Was able to put them right a few times though.