And does anyone remember 1dir+? I loved that program. Used it for years.
Posted on 08/17/2016 10:29:43 AM PDT by zeugma
And does anyone remember 1dir+? I loved that program. Used it for years.
Remember CP/M well. Started with 1.4 in 1976, graduated to 2.2. Wrote a “Game of Life” program in Assembler that moved the characters on the monitor, which was a DMA device, so it moved pretty quickly. Even got the screen to act as a flat representation of a globe, so if you moved off one edge of the screen, it rolled to the opposite edge and continued.
IIRC, we had 16K of memory in the initial configuration, which took up 4 slots on the S-100 bus!
1982
Unix PDP 1130
Installed the RS Board and sent data to a sister location in Salt Lake City over the phone system.
Hey, Al Gore invented it, right?
I have been hooked ever-since.
I’m probably a newbie to talk MacPlus circa 86, IIRC. My son was a good artist in HS. He started on MacPaint. I nought Aldus (?) PageMaker and he did many things for the school. Then adobe Illustrator. He’ll be 47 this year and manages a supermarket chain marketing department. He still uses Illustrator 100.2 or some such version. All from drawing spiderman on MacPaint.
Back in those DOS days the single most useful program I had was called HyperDisk and it was a set of utilities that also included HyperKey and HyperMemory (i think)
The speed disk did disk caching, so any programs that swapped or wrote to disk worked hundreds of times faster. You would execute a ‘write’ command and it would immediately return, but you would hear beeps every second while the caching program actually wrote it.
Hyperkey sped up your keystrokes and repeats- a big deal back then.
Those were two of the best software programs I ever used, and they never ever crashed (also a big deal back then)
The company owner refused to buy ad space in PC MAG and so the next time D-BASE came out with a new version that was fastest ever, OC MAG found out they were actually using HyperDisk to cache writes. So PC MAG bad-mouthed HyperDisk, when it was D-BASE that had issues.
So I stopped subscribing, and shortly around that time discovered Rush Limbaugh, and then FreeRepublic (around the time Bill was disgracing himself with interns)
OMG! I’m so old. I even once figured out how a dial tone at 90 Hz ever made it through the hard wires to your ear in that handset. Turns out the lines (~300-3KHz) couldn’t transmit the 90 90 Hz we normally hear but the human ear has a mixer effect that tends to emphasize the lowest intermodulation product of two tones. The actual tones were a combination of TWO tones: 350Hz and 260 Hz ( during my time) and later 350 and 440 Hz later. The difference (an intermod product) being 90 Hz.
Just a useless fact now.
pfftt. I was writing code in the late 70s. Much like you, I also used programs printed in magazines.
Dude! I was so proud of myself when I found out how to open the “Star-Trek” game inside fortran. The Klingons didn’t have a chance!
I assumed that they mounted my tapes (sounded icky then, too) when my job came up in the queue. Somebody did ... I was never around to watch. Program all day, hang tapes, submit job, go home. Look for output in the morning.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
VAX was much more fun. So were PCs and Workstations when I got to them.
The Star Trek game was awesome.
I remember Himem.
There was also a company called Quarterdeck that made a memory manager called QEMM.SYS
It would not load under Microsoft DOS. Until I found that if you renamed it to MEMM.sys (replacing th first letter with anything) it would run perfectly. Then I discovered through a binary file search that the string QEMM.SYS was in the COMMAND.COM file- and it would refuse to load it.
Quarterdeck should have OWNED microsoft for that...
I started my Engineering degree in 1985 and we were still using punch cards for CAD/CAM. I remember my Commodore 128 spreadsheet. I would enter my data and hit “calculate” and go eat dinner as the spreadsheet made the calculations.
I never thought this interweb thingy would ever catch on.
Plus, we used paper tape with holes punched in it to run through readers. Sometimes, we used a little hand tool to punch holes manually. The tool was called a ‘chicken plucker.’
yah in the air force i worked on a system that used iron ferrite core memory...wires with a little pieced of ferrite to store the state. Hard to convey that to anyone today.
During a tour of an engineering school, 1960 or so, I looked behind the metal case of a computer. The device was a matrix (similar to a 3D chess board) of stiff wires that had a bead of metal at each junction. That was the brains of the computer.
My favorite was Lotus 1.2.3. on VAX/VMS. I themed the range names so that reading a block of them told a story. It was a massive program that I later had to write again from scratch with Virtual Basic for Applications.
They were called transmitter distributors, formally. The holes were round, the paper tapes durable enough to reuse, and the holes numbered 5. 2^5 power equals 32 separate codes. Enough for the alphabet and shift uppercase to catch numbers, etc.
My very first “online” program was one I copied off of a magazine (can’t remember the name). It was several pages of machine-level hexadecimal codes that I saved to a file and ran through debug to produce a .com file. I remember using a ruler to make damned sure I got every line right!
When I fired up the application, my screen came up with a prompt to enter the phone number of the bulletin board to which I wanted to connect. I typed it in, hit ENTER, and heard my modem go! I listened and heard the handshake, then boom! The bulletin board came up! This was in the late 80’s as I recall.
See post #56
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