Trying to find a post about some OS developer in the 80s coding by hand

This looks pretty close to your description: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342143

EDIT: Looks like the parent post entered the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). Not only did all the timestamps get rewritten, but apparently I can now edit this day-old comment :) Interestingly, it does show the correct timestamp when editing. Off-topic, but thought it's interesting behavior worth mentioning.

Was it the Story of Mel?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395589

He also passed away relatively recently.

https://melsloop.com/docs/the-story-of-mel/pages/mel-kaye-cv

This was pretty common back then. I don't recall the post you are talking about but I wrote a little about my own experience here: https://blog.jgc.org/2013/04/how-i-coded-in-1985.html

IIRC, Dijkstra's THE operating system for the Electrologica X8 was completed before the hardware was available. It was the first multitasking operating system (albeit with a fixed set of tasks) and the first use of semaphores. Supposedly the initial version only had trivial coding errors.

I worked with David Cutler and he very much did what he described doing. Others on the kernel team followed similar practices. There is code Dave and I modified together where we then sat and audited it together.

This was all code in the heart of an OS - thread switching, interrupt dispatch, synchronization mechanisms - things where even the most rare and exotic error might actually occur and cause a disaster.

But some hazard/cost computation is needed. There was an article in the '90s about a team doing software for an arm for space work (maybe on the shuttle) - they were hyper careful. I figured out that if all of windows had been made at that rate out of code output it would take 100 years to finish and would cost several trillion dollars. Not long after that that space arm suffered some kind of software failure, in space. Wasn't for want of effort by the dev team.

Remember that many errors arise from things outside the code you wrote/studied - some other code corrupted something, buggy behavoir in hardware, and so forth.

As for coding by hand, simulating by hand, flow graphing by hand, I don't think those were all that unusual, just one person took it to extremes and wrote about it.

Does anyone know if the original source as diagrams and pencil code is preserved somewhere?

It looks as if some of them might have been re-drawn for:

https://www.multicians.org/nss.html

and this is the source code in question?

https://www.multicians.org/vtoc_man.html

They used to have print templates for this sort of thing. Here's an example from the 1960s: https://try-mts.com/system-360-assembly-language-introductio...

We used to have to do this in high school in AP CS in the early 90s. All the tests were to write such and such with pencil and paper. We would get marked off for syntactical mistakes.

I had totally forgotten about this. I still have the PASCAL book.

I remember Mohammed Said (of Laravel fame) telling this story to Matt Stauffer in the Laravel Podcast. He wrote is programs at home on pen and paper and went to the public library to try them out.

This isn't really that uncommon of a thing. Just talk to your ex-Soviet friends. I worked with a Network Engineer whose computer time in uni was limited, so he did exactly this.

Turing and Champernowne coded Turochamp by hand in 1948, but never executed it on a computer. The instructions were however executed with Turing as the computer:

https://www.history.com/news/in-1950-alan-turing-created-a-c...

I couldn't find the exact post, but it might be related to the story of Terry Davis, the creator of TempleOS. He was known for his unique approach to coding and his dedication to his project. Unfortunately, Terry Davis passed away in 2018.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

It can also be Mel

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mel

I think there’s a story in the Bill Gates biography “Hard Drive” about when he flies to MITS in New Mexico to show off BASIC (I think), then realizes he forgot to write a bootloader, so does it on the plane on a yellow legal pad. Toggles it into the Altair during the demo and it works on the first try.

(Might have a lot of details wrong)

This was extremely common in the 80s.

I've got a pile of notebooks full of hand assembled Z80 code that my dad wrote in pencil for the Exidy Sorcerer, which he got in 1979.

It was easier to do that, and reason about your program on paper before running it on the actual computer.

I have the same problem finding an article about meta problem solving. The writer compared it to skiing or judo or some sport. No combination of keywords conjures up the right article in search.

Have you tried using Hacker News Search?

https://hn.algolia.com

Ah yes, the web burns shortly after we shoot it and we left no bread crumbs to navigate the forest. It is true! We used pens, pencils and graph paper to write down and draw all kinds of things while using the computer. Paper has very robust IO. A single note book can hold as many glyphs as ship full of clay tablets but after 40 years you have no idea where you've put it.

I hope @dang remembers? :)

why does this make me immediately think of templeOS