I am working on a long-term project for Linaro, the association of ARM vendors that are working to make GNU/Linux work well on ARM processors. The project requires me to delve into assembly and machine language code – something I have not done for more than 20 years. I would like to tell you why I am so excited about this particular piece of work.

In 1969, I was an electrical engineering student at Drexel Institute of Technology (now called Drexel University) in Philadelphia. Drexel was a cooperative engineering school and I was lucky to get a "coop" assignment at the Western Electric Company in Baltimore.

While at Western Electric, I enrolled in a correspondence course called "How to Program the IBM 1130 Computer in FORTRAN." The course consisted of a book that described how to punch cards, write a FORTRAN program, and run it on the IBM 1130, which we had in the engineering department. That machine was so small and slow by today's standards that it only ran one job at a time, and you linked the device drivers into your program not the operating system. In effect, you "booted" your program to run it. This correspondence course was my first exposure to software.

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