Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

I started with my first lecture in Computer Circuit Fundamentals yesterday.

I only had five out of the supposed sixteen students presents, but that actually means these diligent people now have an advantage over the others who for their own - most likely unacceptable - excuses, did not show up in the first three days of the term.

We used the same computers that I used for the same class exactly a year ago.

One major difference though is that I didn't lecture first on the board (which took at least two meetings last time) but went straight to the simplest type of program, the "Hello World".

That meant that I only had to tell them about the standard format of the data segment, comments and code segment, as well as only three specific commands. We just rounded out the session reviewing the difference between bits, bytes and words.

It was also fortuitous that some of my former students hung around, and were not averse to being asked to recite. I was surprised that one of them still remembered what the LEA command meant, which is "load effective address", although being the second placer for the mathematics championship two years ago, it really should be expected from him.

It was also a bit shameful that the sample program I loaded from my previous errors had at least three errors, such as not returning to the disk operating system, having the last command after the end statement, and not putting the end of string character in their data segment declaration. I don't even remember if we ran this program or not, since I started with a more complex example that already had user input.

Of course that's what I'm going to do next time. And if any of the students arriving for the first time ask about some of the previously taken items, then, just like the EVP I will tell them that they have no right to ask that because they're late.

Session 1639 never shows up for the first week of the term. Class dismissed.