Strange Loop

2009 - 2023

/

St. Louis, MO

Ruby on the Apple II: Adventures in Retro Programming

The minimum system requirements for PowerPoint 2019 are 4 GB of RAM and a 1.6 GHz CPU. The system requirements for this talk are a few kilobytes of RAM, a 5 1/4" floppy disk drive, and a 30 year old computer.

With an 8-bit CPU running at 1 megahertz and kilobytes of RAM, the Apple ][ was a humble machine. Many people first learned to program on it, but the languages designed for the Apple ][ tended to be clumsy and limiting by modern standards. Surely it isn't possible to fit a language as dynamic, rich, and complicated as Ruby on such a limited machine, right?

Come see Ruby running where it has never run before, learn how programming was done decades ago.

Colin Fulton

Colin Fulton

Duo Security

Coming from the world of theatre design and art, Colin is a front-end developer and web accessibility specialist at Duo Security, a division of Cisco. When they aren't at work they are doing silly things like implementing chess games in untyped lambda calculus or writing Conway's Game of Life in significantly fewer characters than it took to write this bio.