Apnea Coding

Hello x86: Low-level assembly coding for the 8086 wiring no-talking, in emulated 80286 / MS-DOS machine in DOSbox. This is a set of four "hello world" codes in x86 assembly, using single-segment 16-bit/i8086 instruction set. The purspose of this tutorial is to demonstrate how exact, minimal-space, yet razor-sharp is assembly coding, especially when dealing with such complexities like the segmented memory model of MS-DOS. The four versions are: Hello1.asm: Old-style standard directives, used by '70s-'80s assemblers, for .EXE output. Hello1C.asm: Old-style standard directives, used by '70s-'80s assemblers, for .COM output. Hello2.asm: Compact 'dot' directives, used by modern assemblers, for .EXE output. Hello2C.asm: Compact 'dot' directives, used by modern assemblers, for .COM output. The difference between .EXE and .COM comes from the MS-DOS era, when the first format required 'far' pointers (segment:offset) for memory ad...

This program is an elementary tutorial in Java illustrating basic syntax, subroutines and basic file I/O. Shuffling the lines of a text file is a very important step when preparing .csv training datasets for Machine Learning models. Java was originally created for rich web applications (see 'applets') and embedded programming, but it quickly became a general-purpose language with seminal cross-platform deployability due to the JVM design. In this example, legacy Java syntax is used for illustrating coding with the very first release (JDK 1.0) back in 1995. This means no support for generics, i.e., only 'Object'-based containers (Vector) and extremely limited API compared to recent versions. And of course no syntax highlighting or code completion features, which where not available in terminals with 'vi' and command-line compiler as the core development platform. Of course, the source can be compiled with today's Java 19 compiler just fine, with the -Xlint:u...

In every writing endeavor, the most difficult part is the beginning. This first week is allocated mostly to setting up things, drafting the Preface and Prologue. A lot of notes and references to organize. #DSbook https://apneacoding.blogspot.com/2024/07/announcement-writing-new-book-in-data.html    

About two years ago an idea was hovering through my mind, a question actually: Why is that “traditional” project managers fail so gloriously in managing teams, especially in the Research and Development (R&D) field of work? I let it mature for a while, thinking that someone will eventually write a book or something about it. Two years have passed and no one did it, so I figured, well, I guess I will have to do that myself. After sending the proposal to only few top publishers, I was privileged enough to land a book contract with Elsevier , which was indeed my first choice for this endeavor.  The subject of the book will be simple: Managing and coordinating teams in the R&D environment, specifically in the domains of Data Analytics, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in general , where I have been working for more than two and a half decades as a professional. Specifically, it will focus on every aspect of teamwork from the first to the last day of a R&D projec...

Floating-point epsilon in retro GW-Basic (MS-DOS) back in the early '80s. This very short code demonstrates how easy it is to get the actual FP accuracy, i.e., the significant decimal digits in FP arithmetic operations. It can be included as-is in any program when needed. The result in GW-Basic is seven FP digits, which is consistent with 4-byte float types used in other programming languages of that era like Fortran and C. Enable captions for more details and walk-through. Source code available at the Github repository (see channel info). Tags: #ambient #coding #programming #notalking #basic #retro #msdos #dosbox

This program is a short example in Ada illustrating basic syntax, subroutines, type constructions and console I/O. Specifically, a basic pattern classifier from Machine Learning, namely a Minimum Distance Classifier (MDC), is constructed by just two core functions/procedures and about 120 lines of code. This type of classifier can successfully address linearly separable problems, here in the 2-D planar domain (X,Y). The Ada programming language is a creation of CII Honeywell Bull company in 1977-1983, under contract to the USA Department of Defense (DoD), with the goal of being the one-fits-all replacement of over 450 other languages used by DoD at that time in various embedded and real-time systems. "Ada" is the credit to Ada Lovelance (1815–1852) or "lady Ada", often referred to as the first computer programmer. The most popular Ada compilers for retro PCs came out Ada came out at the Windows 95/98 era, requiring some DPMI host or extender like DJGPP to run, mak...

This is a typical example of how LISP can be used to solve complex constrained programming tasks. The eight queens puzzle requires the placement of N (minimum) queens in a chessboard so that they do not threaten each other and at the same time control the entire grid. The definition is very simple, but the number of valid solutions explode exponentially as N becomes larger than eight. LISP was officially released in 1960, making it the third milestone programming language of the first era, along with Fortran and COBOL. The syntax of LISP is saturated with parentheses, which makes it somewhat difficult for reading but very efficient for parsing by the interpreter. At the same time it makes search tree creation very intuitive, a paradigm that was later used by several other declarative laguages like Prolog. Enable captions for more details and walk-through. Source code available at the Github repository (see channel info). Tags: #asmr #coding #programming #notalking #lisp #terminal ...

The factorization of an integer in retro GW-Basic no talking, in emulated 80286 / MS-DOS machine in DOSbox. This tutorial is a taste of how home programming looked like in the early '80s, while also showing how notoriously slow GW-Basic was with arithmetic calculations. Enable captions for more details and walk-through. Source code available at the Github repository (see channel info). #ambient #coding #programming #notalking #basic #retro #msdos #dosbox

Floating-point epsilon estimation in retro Fortran no-talking, in emulated 80286 / MS-DOS machine in DOSbox. This program implements floating-point 'epsilon' estimation in retro Fortran no-talking, in emulated 80286 / MS-DOS machine in DOSbox. This very short code demonstrates how easy it is to get the actual FP accuracy, i.e., the significant decimal digits in FP arithmetic operations. The result in Fortran 77 is seven FP digits for REAL type and 15 digits for DOUBLE PRECISION type, which are consistent with 2-byte and 4-byte float types, correspondingly, used in other programming languages of that era like C. Warning: In some older versions of Microsoft's Fortran 77, the batch process 'FORT.BAT' assumed that the input filename is given as argument *without* the '.FOR' extension. If it is given, then the output is unpredictable and usually results in a corrupted *original* (source) file! Make sure to always keep backup before compiling - I had to write th...