[plug] re: Hacker challenge ends in feuding

[Onno Benschop]

On Tue, 2003-07-08 at 16:17, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 04:09:41PM +0800, James Devenish wrote:
> | In message <20030708080304.32759.qmail at www-02.iinet.net.au>
> | on Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 08:03:04AM -0000, Simon Scott wrote:
> | > SYS64738 - hehehehehe
> | > 
> | > cool nickname - maybe Ill change mine to POKE53280,0 ;)
> | 
> | Can this be explained to a Linux audience? ;)
> | (I assume it's a Windows joke.)
> 
> Looks like Commodore 64 (Or maybe Apple ][ ?) to me, but I've no idea
> what it actually means.  So I second the call for an explanation :-)

While this is a little scary, that I recognised what you're all talking
about (my first computer was a VIC 20), here's a brief explanation:

Memory in 6502 machies (all 64K if you had it installed) was all mapped
to the same address space, 0 being the bottom of memort and 65535 being
the top of memory. (0 to 255 is the stack BTW)

Most of the computers of that era ran BASIC as their operating system.
To interact with memory you could "PEEK" at a memory location, or "POKE"
something into a memory location.

To run an assembly program in memory you could issue a "SYS" command,
which would then start running what ever byte-codes were in memory from
that location.

So, SYS 64738, runs a piece of code at that location in memory.

Now I had to cheat a little here (google) to figure out which machine it
was - but the C64 people were right on the money. (In Apple land this
was called "CALL".) Issueing a SYS 64738 will cause a Commodore 64 to
reboot.

HTH,

Onno Benschop 

Connected via Optus B3 from S33:37'33" - E115:07'30" (Dunsborough, WA)
-- 
()/)/)()        ..ASCII for Onno.. 
|>>?            ..EBCDIC for Onno.. 
--- -. -. ---   ..Morse for Onno.. 

Proudly supported by Skipper Trucks, Highway1, Concept AV, Sony Central, Dalcon
ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 8888 - onno at itmaze dot com dot au