Sometimes I think I was born at the wrong time. I sure would have loved to hack in the bad old days of computing where the computer came with schematics and you understood exactly (or had a good try of it) what the machine was doing.
At least, I think I'd like it better than hoping that my motherboard can authorize itself to the drm in my graphics card so the hi-def from my own camera will play on my screen at more than 320x240.
My favourite part is about the lack of memory protection on the multi-user PDP-11/20:
When anyone was working on a program, it was considered a courtesy to yell "A.OUT?" before trying it, to warn others to save whatever they were editing.
Low-level machine hacks can be inscrutable even when the machine they're implemented for is current. For instance, there's the infamous line from Quake source code that reads:
The strangest one I've seen is the fast sqrt() function in SGI OpenGL source code: there's a magic step where a right bit shift is applied to a 32bit IEEE float.
(oops.. just clicked your link, looks like we're related)
At least, I think I'd like it better than hoping that my motherboard can authorize itself to the drm in my graphics card so the hi-def from my own camera will play on my screen at more than 320x240.