CHARLES PETZOLD

Free lunches don't come cheap.

I started out with machine code and assembly language.

Some programs - especially games - require that your system be set to a particular color depth and resolution. Often such special settings are different from your usual mode, though.

Owning a computer without programming is like having a kitchen and using only the microwave oven

The human species is often amazingly inventive and industrious but at the same time profoundly lazy. It's very clear that we humans don't like to work. This aversion to work is so extreme - and our ingenuity so acute - that we're eager to devote countless hours designing and building devices that might shave a few minutes off our workday

MIDI made a natural transition to the PC. The MIDI messages that make up a musical composition can be saved as MIDI files, which are collections of MIDI messages with timing information.

I felt more like a scientist exploring nature, and Windows was my environment. You don't pass judgment on nature; you just explain how it works.

Blend is great for designers because it implements a lot of sophisticated behaviours, but for what I like to do, hand coding XAML is preferable, particularly because I have to publish it.

You probably don't have much of a choice.

Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick

Some programs - especially games - require that your system be set to a particular color depth and resolution. Often such special settings are different from your usual mode, though.

Blend is great for designers because it implements a lot of sophisticated behaviours, but for what I like to do, hand coding XAML is preferable, particularly because I have to publish it.

Computer monitors can operate in many different video modes. In most cases, the decision about how many pixels and colors to display is yours - but not always.

MIDI made a natural transition to the PC. The MIDI messages that make up a musical composition can be saved as MIDI files, which are collections of MIDI messages with timing information.

Many MIDI files contain entire musical compositions. Because MIDI supports only 16 channels, however, no more than 16 different instruments can play at any time, and one of those is the key-based percussion instrument.

I really liked figuring things out on my own. Early on in the development of a new version of Windows, I would explore it, I would try out various things, I would see what worked, I would see what didn't work.

I started out with machine code and assembly language.

I felt more like a scientist exploring nature, and Windows was my environment. You don't pass judgment on nature; you just explain how it works.

A MIDI file contains coded instructions to play a particular series of notes on an electronic music synthesizer. A MIDI file is more like a piano roll in a player piano than any type of sound recording.

All modern MIDI synthesizers are capable of polyphony, which means they can play more than one note at a time and more than one instrument at a time.

You probably don't have much of a choice.

Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.

In some far-off distant time, when the twentieth century history of primitive computing is just a murky memory, someone is likely to suppose that devices known as logic gates were named after the famous co-founder of Microsoft Corporation

Free lunches don't come cheap.

Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick

To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API.

NOP stands for (and is pronounced) no op, as in no operation. The NOP causes the processor to do absolutely nothing. What's it good for? Filling space. The 8080 can usually execute a bunch of NOP instructions without anything bad happening

Owning a computer without programming is like having a kitchen and using only the microwave oven

The human species is often amazingly inventive and industrious but at the same time profoundly lazy. It's very clear that we humans don't like to work. This aversion to work is so extreme - and our ingenuity so acute - that we're eager to devote countless hours designing and building devices that might shave a few minutes off our workday