A Nine-Year-Old’s Z80 Drawing Program

Full disclosure: [Óscar] isn’t nine now, but he was in 1988 when he wrote LOCS, a drawing program in Z80 assembly modeled after Logo. You can see a demo of the system in the video below. You …

Who’s Afraid Of Assembly Language?

This week, [Al Williams] wrote a great thought piece about whether or not it was worth learning an assembly language at all anymore, and when. The comments overflowed, and we’re surprised that so m…

Ask Hackaday: Learn Assembly First, Last, Or Never?

A few days ago, I ran into an online post where someone pointed out the book “Learn to Program with Assembly” and asked if anyone had ever learned assembly language as a first programmi…

A Literate Assembly Language

A recent edition of [Babbage’s] The Chip Letter discusses the obscurity of assembly language. He points out, and I think correctly, that assembly language is more often read than written, yet…

It Isn’t WebAssembly, But It Is Assembly In Your Browser

You might think assembly language on a PC is passe. After all, we have a host of efficient high-level languages and plenty of resources. But there are times you want to use assembly for some reason…

Assembly Language 80’s Minicomputer Style

In the days before computers usually used off-the-shelf CPU chips, people who needed a CPU often used something called “bitslice.” The idea was to have a building block chip that needed…

ARM Programming By Example

The ARM processor is popping up everywhere. From Raspberry Pis, to phones, to Blue Pill Arduino-like boards, you don’t have to go far to find an ARM processor these days. If you program in C,…

Building MS-DOS From Scratch Like It’s 1983

Building a complete operating system by compiling its source code is not something for the faint-hearted; a modern Linux or BSD distribution contains thousands of packages with millions of lines of…