I owned TMON but didn't know how to use it. Maybe I thought I would learn.
I was always impressed with people that could use it (or MacsBug) and follow a backtrace off the stack, understand the registers....
Looking at that assembly these days and it looks so quaint and even simple when compared to modern RISC assembly dumps. Maybe I could even come to understand it now.
It follows a pattern I have noticed where whatever the current tech is often looks intimidating to me, but years down the road I look back and it no longer seems really that challenging to understand.
Maybe when the tech is new there are a lot of other new things concordant that can overwhelm. But given enough time those periphery things fall away or have become knowable and the crux of the tech is revealed to have been simpler that I thought it was all along.
The nice thing that happened here thirty years ago is that the programmer probably didn’t really want to implement anything as silly and counter to his fun as expiring the program he’s working on. So he did it in such a straightforward manner that it could be undone by anyone with the kind of tools they would have in the future. What a cool guy. Too bad his app got taken over by bozos, but maybe he made a piece out of it and moved on to better things.
I was always impressed with people that could use it (or MacsBug) and follow a backtrace off the stack, understand the registers....
Looking at that assembly these days and it looks so quaint and even simple when compared to modern RISC assembly dumps. Maybe I could even come to understand it now.
It follows a pattern I have noticed where whatever the current tech is often looks intimidating to me, but years down the road I look back and it no longer seems really that challenging to understand.
Maybe when the tech is new there are a lot of other new things concordant that can overwhelm. But given enough time those periphery things fall away or have become knowable and the crux of the tech is revealed to have been simpler that I thought it was all along.