20 Jun
2021
20 Jun
'21
4:55 a.m.
Ah -- if it was adb you redid, no doubt of its power. I used adb for a
long time -- PDP-11/VAX/68K but as you said, you could learn a lot about
your system. FWIW: we embedded adb into RTU, calling it kdb. We didn't
have no fancy VMs to run the system under, when it halted, it halted. On
a personal machine that was not a problem and adb/kdb was very cool.
Clem
On Sat, Jun 19, 2021 at 5:50 PM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Although upon reflection, I think what I did was fix
'adb' and call it
'db'. Haven't had my coffee yet this morning.
-rob
On Sun, Jun 20, 2021 at 7:49 AM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> For v8 or thereabouts, I spent some time fixing some fundamental bugs in
> db and found that it was arcane but remarkably powerful. Since it was lower
> level, it avoided the endemic debugging problem of misleading you about
> your program: All it could do was tell you what the machine was doing.
> (Cdb, sdb, and adb were, at least in my experience, always lying to you.) I
> may be the only person who appreciated db fully. Once the bugs were gone
> you really could use it to good effect, as long as you understood the CPU.
>
> But it was buggy and arcane, no question about that.
>
> -rob
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 20, 2021 at 6:46 AM Richard Salz <rich.salz(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I remember compiling and playing Langston's "empire" that I was
told
>> came from a decompiled executable. This was in the 4.2 days.
>>
>