Cleared out the loft, found some old code!

Way back in the early 1990s, I found myself writing some code using the C language. I was using an Acorn Archimedes at the time, a machine that was very advanced for its day.

In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And programmers were real programmers. We didn’t have any of your namby pamby frameworks to rely on, we were men of steel, we worked a bit and byte level, heck, we even had to perform our own memory management. We didn’t even have an IDE, we used the command-line compiler with builds performed via a makefile. Winning a byte here or there was a real boon, especially as our target machines had only 1MB, 2MB or if we were lucky, 4MB of main RAM available. But we had to code to the lowest common denominator, so we found ourselves working to a minimum spec of 1MB. None of the luxuries of today, no sir.