Tech talk - religious wars on editors - and other old time s

[qbv8]

Truclawrote: Thanks a bunch qbv8 (stands for Quick Basic version 8? ) for reminding me times when I was trying to know what a text editor was for...

Speaking about editors ... :
Back in the good old days of IBM /370 I had the opportunity to work in the computer department of a big oil company. They had an IBM /370 and I was programming it in PL/I using punch cards (!). But as the program was so big (many kilo bytes), I got the permission to store the source code onto one of the drum disks. And for performing changes on the source code, I used a batch editor that got commands via punch cards. And why do I tell you this story? Well, the command to change some text in a line was the qbv8 command --- which one day I mistyped starting on the wrong column, and that distroyed the whole data on the drum.

What shall I tell you ... the boss was "not amused" . It took me 48 hours to restore (mostly) everything that was there. These were 48 hours where I got a special security guard standing in the front door and taking care that I am well and working (and do not run away ).

And I never forgot this "adventure" as you can imagine.

Today everybody would blame the software company that wrote this "editor" for unsecure and bad software behaviour, but at the end of the seventies, programs were very unforgiveable. You can still see some "survivors" of this mindset in Unix: type unlink, and you will receive no mercy.

[Trucla]

Well after all these years it is a really nice story. And - not being a coder - I remember those heroic times when programming was done using all those punch cards, and when the mainframes occupied big rooms and had inside their closets millions (or billions, I don't know) of thin isolated wires very well ranged in groups by cramps! In the bank I used to work the analysts and programmers used to use the obsolete punch cards as a kind of notepad, when they were talking to us the simple mortal people.

Not connected with my nick but with the computers activity, I have another story that was somehow embarrassing.

One day in my bank I've applied for a little course "Initiation to computers" or something of the kind. So I went there mainly for learning a bit of the technical language IT people used when we had meetings for planning or changing things. The guy monitoring the course was a good friend of mine. At a certain point he said something like "the only way of programming is using the punch cards". At this point (I had seen in our Paris branch a guy changing programs in COBOL using a terminal, no punch cards) I said: "Hey it's not like that. I've seen people doing it by terminal"
- It's impossible! - the guy replied - It can't be done that way!

Ok, I let it down because there was quite an audience attending to the course. At the end of the session though I've approached my friend in private and said him that he was wrong. Only two years later he came to me and said that I was right, but by the time of the course he thought not, because... his manager didn't want to use other media so never told them that there was a simpler way of doing things.

Cheers!

[qbv8]

Yeah, speaking about terminals ...

I remember the day when they bought the first graphics terminal. It was a Tektronix and it took four strong men to carry this terminal into the room.

It was not black and white, no, it was brilliant green on dark green. That kind of green that horror film makers use when they want to show a slimy daemon --- you got blind looking at it. And after about one year, the login screen has burned itself into the monitor so that you could see it even when the terminal was shut off.

[LRM]

LRM wrote :
*.exe
*.com
*.bat
xtree Pro

I own an operational 286 that has never seen Windows.
♫ Those were the days ♪
L
I still occasionally play "Moraff's Revenge"; on my XP.

Computer Products United (CPU) Jan 1986 ±, shipped to Spangdahlem, AFB Germany.
1 meg of ram populated in many chip sockets on the mother board, and I think a 20 meg MFM hard drive. I filled it up after many years and upgraded to 107 meg IDE hard drive. I had to install new bios because the Phoenix bios installed didn't believe there could be anything larger than 40 meg. She served me well for many years.
My next machine was a Gateway Pentium purchased with Windows 95. Upgraded to windows 98 just before 2000 and finally replaced that machine in 2006.
22 Apr 2006 new Gateway GM5072 running XP Pro Media edition. Thats what I'm using as I write this.
Less than 1 year ago we purchased a Dell laptop running Vista... I hate that word!!!
L

[coder]

I started with a C64, 64K of completely reprogrammable memory. Hundreds of games on cassettes. (the same ones you can put in an audio cassette player). 16 colors and an amazing sound. Even speach with some games. (mission impossible: "Stay a while, stay forever, ha ha ha ha" That's also where I first learned basic (one language which should not have been invented) and then assembly as a kid.

I remember friends having xt's and the games looking awfull and that terrible sound of the pc speaker. Though modplay could get some someway decent sound out of it. Ah modedit, I had some fun with that. Though I've been far happier with screamtracker, which came years later when you had vga and you could still directly write to your display within a 64k range at $A000.

The OS was o so simple and games were still creative, Lemmings, Goblins, to name a few incredible ones. Windows came and it sucked till 98 came and it became somewhat decent. I've used 98SE for years. It's like an old car. The engine is simple, you can change/tweak almost everything and every once in a while you have to pop the hood to maintain it.

Than I switched to 2000 (that was when xp SP1 was out), since my old beastie could not run xp, unless you were very very patient. Never really liked xp, microxp is ok. I run that in a virtualbox on my linux laptop now.

I tried linux one and a half year ago, first dual boot and then after half a year I threw off windows, since I hadn't started it more than 2 or 3 times in that half year And now I'm a very happy linux user. And I love the terminal. Press tab to complete filenames/directories, so much easier than typing everything.

Also installing (let's say dosbox) is just 'sudo apt-get install dosbox'.(debian based as you can see) It will download and install and update automatically afterwards. No thousands of clicks (open ff, google, type dosbox, search, click dosbox, find download page, download, click install, confirm, next, next, next, next. next. finish) Okay I can also use a gui, which I sometimes use to search.

And I mostly love having full control over my system. No "you user, you stupid"/for your own safety we don't allow you to do what you want-policy there. Man have I cursed when troubleshooting in windows. Eventually you'll find a solution which works, but the path to get there is like a maze.

[qbv8]

Wow, coder, when I look into your profile and I see 1977, that means that you have started at a very early age. The C64 was sold in Europe at about 1983 ...



Do you remember the storage capacity of an analog [no]disc[/no] tape? Experienced C64 gurus even claimed that they could understand the data by playing the cassette in a stereo tape recorder and listening to the sound

[coder]

We had it when I was about ten. My dad had bought it from my uncle. What do you mean by analog disc?

[qbv8]

Sorry, was a typographic error -> see above.

[digits]

A bit on software:
A dutch guy rewrote some old Sierra titles in Javascrïpt (nothing fancy to play, only your fav. Browser )
http://sarien.net/

Note: the i in javascr i pt is there. Just see that stupid interpreter at work.
Credits to qbv8 for this.

[coder]

Understand the data by listening to the sound is total bullshit.There are a very few people who can read hexadecimal numbers as machine code. And that's already very rare.
I can't remember how many games could fit on a casette. I remember there were some of 60 minutes and some of 90 and they had at least 10 games per site. But if it was 10, 20 or 30 games for a 60 minutes tape? It's still lying somewhere with my parents. Somewhere in the back of a very very big and completely filled wall closet.

[coder]

For those who like old adventure games. Take a look at at adventure game studio. Lots of freeware games and an excellent VGA remake of kings quest I+II. For two they even added a puzzle and changed the storyline a bit, to make it more logical. Scummvm can nowadays also play the old sierra games as well as lots of others (even on your pda) Who had thought that you could play monkey islands on your phone in 10 years time.
Anyone remember this sound?

[LRM]

qbv8 wrote:
Wow, coder, when I look into your profile and I see 1977, that means that you have started at a very early age. The C64 was sold in Europe at about 1983 ...

Do you remember the storage capacity of an analog [no]disc[/no] tape? Experienced C64 gurus even claimed that they could understand the data by playing the cassette in a stereo tape recorder and listening to the sound

I'm not the least bit Commodore savy... PC 5¼ floppies were 6?? KB for normal and 1.2 MB for high capacity. Somewhere I have probably 100 of them. The last time I tried to use one gravity had distorted the sleeve it spins in (stored on edge) and it wouldn't operate. I have a purchased copy of "Moraff's Revenge" on a 5¼" floppy and the original code book printed on red paper so it could not be copied.
L

[Trucla]

OK let's talk about how I got involved with computers, without never being a real coder.

Many many moons ago by Xmas a friend of mine offered to my children a Sinclair 1000, a very powerful machine with 16 KB (yes, I said KB, not MB, nor GB) of RAM. As a monitor it used a TV set (I helped myself with an old little black and white TV) and for storing there were those cassettes that we put in a tape reader/recorder, the cheapest the best. I've installed the puppy got some games (in cassettes) and explained the kids how to use the stuff. From time to time I've watched them playing, and they seem to enjoy it.



Some months later in one of those rainy boring days I was alone at home and decided to open the manual and started reading the parts devoted to programming (a kind of Basic).



So I turned on the computer and tried the first commands/instructions it suggested. And I was amazed how the machine obeyed to my orders! After half a dozen of commands, I decided to close the manual and try things on my own. Of course when I got stuck I checked the manual for finding the correct way of speaking to the machine.

From then on, when the kids were not playing and I was at home, I used to play more with it. At a certain stage I decided to build an address book. Struggling to build it I've learned that the system used 8 bytes for storing the value of any numeric variable (regardless of how many digits its had) while for the strings it used 1 byte per character. So I could spare a lot of space if I made all the variables as numeric. But this was just the beginning, because later on I proudly discovered that each character having a code (from 0 to 255) I could store a number from 0 to 65535 in just 2 Bytes! It was fantastic!

Unfortunately as I moved from the house I lived then I don't know anymore where the cassette of my first creation is. The computer itself I still keep it as a memory, even knowing that most probably it will not work anymore.

After this one it came the Spectrum 48, Timex 2068 (working with 2 floppy drives), the first PC, an Amstrad 1512 with two floppy drives plus a card hard drive of 10MB, a 286, a 486, a Pentium 90, etc... etc...

I've developed some little applications in GWBasic and Quick Basic, and later on turned a bit for dBase3, followed by Clipper87 (for those who don't know it's a kind of compiled dBase).

In a more recent version of Clipper I've developed an application that was used in my former bank (I don't know if it's still used), as I was tired of asking things from the IT people and not getting them, or getting something that was very far from what was needed. Always communication problems...

But I insist I'm not a coder. Just a curious who doesn't like being commanded by the machines!

Sorry for having been so looooooong!

Cheers!

[coder]

Do you remember the storage capacity of an analog disc tape?

The question got me thinking.

Just read on the wiki that the tape recorder was approximately 300 baud (though most programs used some mechanism to load faster.) But assuming that's true than 64K would take 65536/300/60 minutes, that is somewhere between 3 and 4 minutes. Which would make about 16 games on a side of 60 minutes and something like 24 on one side of a 90 minutes tape. Assuming that's all correct.

[LRM]

coder wrote :

Do you remember the storage capacity of an analog disc tape?

The question got me thinking.

Just read on the wiki that the tape recorder was approximately 300 baud (though most programs used some mechanism to load faster.) But assuming that's true than 64K would take 65536/300/60 minutes, that is somewhere between 3 and 4 minutes. Which would make about 16 games on a side of 60 minutes and something like 24 on one side of a 90 minutes tape. Assuming that's all correct.

If Dad were still here He'd enjoy this discussion of the C64. He was a Ham radio operator and cheated using a C64 to decode all the dots and dashes, if my memory is correct. The only thing the radio did for me was to rob my sleep, his radio was in the opposite end of an open attic from my bedroom.