My favourite part is about the lack of memory protection on the multi-user PDP-11/20:

When anyone was working on a program, it was considered a courtesy to yell "A.OUT?" before trying it, to warn others to save whatever they were editing.

Great read although I'm not sure I understand the assembly part :/

Low-level machine hacks can be inscrutable even when the machine they're implemented for is current. For instance, there's the infamous line from Quake source code that reads:

    i  = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the fuck?

People have tried to investigate the origin of this baffling hack and mostly failed. See, e.g., http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/ .

Sometimes I think I was born at the wrong time. I sure would have loved to hack in the bad old days of computing where the computer came with schematics and you understood exactly (or had a good try of it) what the machine was doing.

At least, I think I'd like it better than hoping that my motherboard can authorize itself to the drm in my graphics card so the hi-def from my own camera will play on my screen at more than 320x240.

I'm sure they dreamed of a bright future where 1 Mhz, even 100 Mhz, machines were common.

Is the Bob Morris he references rtm's dad?