{"id":1356,"date":"2013-03-05T22:29:08","date_gmt":"2013-03-06T03:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/me-en.kaspersky.com\/blog\/?p=1356"},"modified":"2020-02-26T18:56:14","modified_gmt":"2020-02-26T14:56:14","slug":"the-history-of-programming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/me-en.kaspersky.com\/blog\/the-history-of-programming\/1356\/","title":{"rendered":"How Scary Can An Old-School Programmer Be?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"assembly_EN\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Recently Eugene Kaspersky wrote in his blog a post about the so called Big Comeback of old-school virus writers.<\/a> I am old enough to remember those guys and their brilliant work \u2013 I don\u2019t necessarily mean malware creators, I\u2019m talking about programmers, coders and assembler masters. They are like Jedi and the Sith of Old Empire whom all Skywalker-related saga heroes considered much more powerful and skilled with the light sabers (no kiddin\u2019, ask Yoda). And I thought\u2026 damn\u2026 there are probably around 3 people left out there who witnessed the true power of those people (me, Kaspersky<\/a> and Bill Gates). Seriously \u2013 it is quite hard to understand what an old school hacker is capable of \u2013 I decided to show you what Eugene was talking about, so you could decide for yourself whether this was scary news.<\/p>\n

Extreme workout for stupid calculators<\/h3>\n

Back in 1992 computers were basically smart calculators with big screens (this is not a joke, kids). But there were several groups of enthusiasts who were happy to face software challenges: some programmers managed to create codes that used every byte of memory, every processor function and register, every OS command and, what is most important, 100% of hardware power \u2013 squeezed it all to the last drop and checked out the result. I have to point out that in order to truly nail those tasks, one has to be damn creative, drink a lot of coffee (or smoke a lot of weed, let\u2019s be honest) \u2013 and have an insane IQ level. The movement itself started around 1988, basically, together with first more or less widely spread version of MS-DOS. It had no official name, but according to the laws of evolution, sooner or later they\u2019d have to compete. And this is how \u201cAssembly\u201d was born in 1992.<\/p>\n

\"school_EN\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Future Crew is back from the future<\/h3>\n

In 1992 a group of Scandinavian coders called \u201cFuture Crew\u201d together with their friends from \u201cComplex\u201d and \u201cAmiga\u201d programming groups organized an event called \u201cThe Assembly\u201d in order to share the results of their kick-ass work on Assembler language and compete for the title of the Best Coder of the year. There were several disciplines, but two most interesting are platform (PC, Amiga, C64) demos and PC 64k. The first had the goal of demonstrating the most elegant coding solutions\/best abilities of the hardware with minimalistic and optimal code. The second was a tricky one \u2013 coders were limited to 64kb \u2013 their compiled programs (means \u2013 read2work file(s)) could not be more than 64kilobytes \u2013 that\u2019s why this nomination turned out to be a contest of codin\u2019 elegance.<\/p>\n

A coding demo is basically a scripted serie of events programmed to demonstrate the capabilities of hardware or\/and top software solutions for a particular task, such as complex physics calculations\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Back in 1992 the Future Crew won the competition with their \u201cUnreal\u201d demo. Here it is (note that this is 1992 and there\u2019s no Windows yet. This demo was called Unreal for a reason \u2013 nobody(!) performed anything like that before):<\/p>\n