At work we’ve been using a configuration management system called Ansible. Great software, but not that name. Unfortunately the name comes from a book I won’t name, because the author is a racist homophobe.

Yeah that guy.

Orson Scott Card.

Don’t take my word for it. Google it. I’m ashamed that he claims to be an SF author.  I will not ready anything he has written. Obviously his views will permeate the work.

As my friend, Julie would say… Onwards.

With Ansible, you  can configure Linux systems to your liking. You do ALL the work upfront. But, when you are done, you have an idempotent configuration “script” (YAML but close enough).  It’s exactly what you want, because you have to do  every step the way you want it. No shortcuts.

This brings me to assembly as a language.  You get to control every single thing your program does because you have to write every single step yourself. Logic errors are rare because you have to think at a much lower level. Sure syntax errors will happen. Worst case scenario, your compiler (in this case your assembler) will catch it. Middle case, your syntaxy highlighting editor will catch it. Best case YOU catch it. 🙂

So i’ve been wanting to get back into assembly. Way back when I bought a copy of  QuickC/QuickAssembler 2.51. But it was infected. I could never use it. It was expensive at the time, and getting it replaced was going to be more expensive.

After my dosbox experience, I thought  why not install it  under dosbox. QC251 wasn’t that hard to find.

the img files were not as bad to deal with as i’d been reading. Find a virtual floppy driver, mount an disk1.img as  A: copy disk1 files over, do the same thing for disk2.img, and disk3.img

mount that disk A: in dosbox, run the setup. Woila! you have QuickC/QuickAssembler ready to go after answering some questions.

I was so happy with results I had to write this. 🙂

Does this age me? Sure, don’t effing care. 🙂