GEMS TV VICKI HOW TO
GEMS TV VICKI CODE

GEMS TV VICKI HOW TO

He first job that any coder needs to do when writing a new piece of software is to figure out how to take the information that is being worked with (in a graphics program, an image in a spreadsheet, a grid of numbers) and turn it into a linear string of bytes. Now (or rather, 1999, the vantage point from where Stephenson writes), When you were using cards, you'd punch a whole stack of them and run them through the reader all at once, which was called batch processing. These embodied two fundamentally different approaches to computing.

When computers came into being around the time of the Second World War, humans, quite naturally, communicated with them by simply grafting them on to the already-existing technologies for translating letters into bits and vice versa: teletypes and punch card machines. We had a human/computer interface a hundred years before we had computers. People used to have to do this kind of conversion very manually, We write computer programs for a number of reasons, but, ultimately, all of them are converting higher-level information that humans can understand (text, tweets, video), to bytecode, moving it around, and then converting the bytes again until they are human-legible. It is this bytecode that the machine can read, and that makes up all of our software and moves our information through the internet. When you have lots of bytes, you have bytecode. A byte is just a string of eight 1s or 0s. The smallest unit of information is a byte. He explains that computers, at their core, are moving information around. In the beginning, Stephenson writes, there was a command line. What was it like to work all those years ago, to write code? I don’t know. Multitiered client-server, object-oriented systems, consumer networks - all the cool stuff that was on the opposite side of the universe from her fifteen-year-assembler code. Now she wanted to talk to me about all the groovy new technologies being tried out by a special programming group. When the vice president saw my sympathies, she relaxed. Over time, the comments begin to outnumber the programming statements, but it does no good. “It’s in assembler?” I felt a true, physical sickness. “If it all breaks down,” she said, “the banks can’t balance their accounts.”Ī wave of nausea washed over me: I imagined what it would feel like to leave a bug lying around and wind up being responsible for shutting down banks around the world.” The vast network of banks, automated tellers, clearinghouses, computers, phone lines - all which go into sending a single credit card transaction around the globe - was her domain. In one of the chapters, she tells the story of a meeting she had with a vice-president of a big bank, in charge of re-engineering global transaction processing payments.

GEMS TV VICKI CODE

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it was like to write code 20, 30 years ago.Īt the time, one of my favorite tech writers, Ellen Ullman, was working as a developer and project manager and wrote an amazing book, “Close to the Machine”, about the art of software development, life, philosophy, and everything in between. Art: Profit I, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982

Gems tv vicki