Such is the desperation of developing on a system with very tight memory constraints.Įverything was working smoothly, until the author returned to school for a semester. There was no way to bootstrap it from the interpreter.Īs the author added features, he kept hitting the Apple ][‘s 48KB RAM limit and was forced to delete all the comments from the code, and when that wasn’t enough, he resorted to shortening all the important variable names to one character. This meant that once TASC development reached the point that it required chaining, it could be run only in its compiled form.

It was one of a handful of language extension provided by TASC itself, through the use of magic comments that begin with an exclamation point. Chaining was a common technique when your program got too large to fit into memory all at once, so you broke it into multiple programs that each handed off control to each other.Įven if you hadn’t made it that deep into the manual, you could have figured out that TASC was used to compile itself because TASC used its own runtime library.Ĭhaining was not a feature native to Applesoft BASIC. All three passes were written largely in Applesoft, and TASC was used to compile itself.Ĭhaining refers to a program instructing the system to replace the current program in memory with another program, but preserve the values of some or all variables. PASS0 and PASS1 chain to PASS1 and PASS2, respectively. PASS0 simply picks up user inputs and sets up compilation parameters, so it is not really part of the actual compilation process. TASC is a “two-pass” compiler, since it compiles in two major steps. Microsoft licensed the product and hired the author, who spent the summer at the Northup building¹ polishing the code. TASC was written by one person in his dorm room while studying at MIT. That compiler went by the name TASC: The Apple soft Compiler. There’s a good chance it doesn’t work anymore, and hasn’t for a long time.Back in the early 1980’s, the Apple ][ computer was taking the personal computing world by storm, and Microsoft released a compiler for Applesoft BASIC. The lines long ago outlived their utility, he said, but not the “magic.”Īnd maybe the magic is this: We all remember a number from our childhood. The phone lines normally get a big boost twice a year when the time changes - “that’s like the Super Bowl for time and temperature” - but Lochridge thinks the business will survive a possible coming change to permanent daylight saving time. One female caller told him, “It’s a little slice of Mayberry.” And I’m calling time and temperature just for some company.” Lochridge quotes a lyric by the Old 97′s: “Well, a box of red and a pill or three.

To have something from your childhood that’s still around in this world that is quickly changing, it’s special.” Something that was there for them in happy times and sad times. “This is kind of sad, but a lot of people call us because they don’t have anyone else to call,” he said. The lonely stories stick with him - the woman who called often when she was hospitalized to keep grounded with reality the guy who worked at a desolate store in Death Valley and dialed long-distance just to hear a human voice. Lochridge said he spends hours poring over the comments people post after learning time and temp is back in their city. (I later learned these were used by phone companies to test call quality.) It’s why I still take photos of pay phones today. For instance, a classmate turned me on to a supposedly haunted “doppelganger number,” where everything I said took on an eerie echo.

I can’t deny that telephones - if you can imagine it - used to be fun. Dutiful, even if no one needs it.Īnd of course it’s a bit of cheap nostalgia. And there’s comfort in finding that a system that was always there has continued on. There’s a thin line between habit and ritual. “That means the people had been calling for months, even when the service was gone. “In the first week he got 14,000 calls,” Robertson said.

The guy plugged it in but made no announcement that it was back. He described a client who’d taken control of an old line in Kentucky. I told him how I’d never completely stopped calling. He also sells the tech that makes modern time and temperature lines like Lochridge’s work. Today is Friday, April 8, the current time 11:04 a.m. The former radio announcer provides the distinguished voice callers hear today. Seeking the source of this small miracle, I connected with RTI Media founder Bruce Robertson.

Memory macbook pro mid 2010