On Sun, 14 Sep 2003 10:57:52 -0400, "Bill Blanton"
<heh heh> "...it's for a school project" :-)

Steve Gibson does, though his output is scanty (as tends to be the
case, if coding in asm heh heh)

Yep - and that's how it is, really; you either go embedded, or you
write drivers, and if the latter, it's big-corp suit-and-tie I guess.

Gates may have a fondness for BASIC, seeing as that was something of a
starting point for him; may be a factor in the BASIC-themed VBS, VBA
etc. I never got into BASIC in DOS; it was such an ugly language,
what with all the segment register things, data type casts, multiple
ways of rounding to integers etc.

It wasn't that I wouldn't have been able to handle that; more that
PICK's DataBASIC was so much more elegant (as is their database model)
that I'd rather try out my ideas there. The other PC language I
dabbled in and liked was the procedure language from Paradox for DOS.

Yep - and generally I'd be doing just that; Windows (or DOS, for
mainetnance) programs. I've never been one for the "lowest common
denominator" look that pervades attempts at portability, but then
again nothing I've done has needed that portability.

I like those ideas, but it can make for messy code (from the
processor's viewpoint). Prolly find 20% of your CPU power goes into
all the context save-and-restores.

Languages are languages, and writing in modern ones is more like
journalism than conversation. You say what you are going to say
(declarations, library enumerations etc.) then you say it (the code)
and then you summarise what you said (the Make).

Whereas I preferred the immediacy of "chatting" to the processor :-)

That's why I've bounced off VBS so far (staying with .bat instead)...

Create an instance of Fire called "Fire"
Create an instance of Meat called "Meat"
Create an instance of Hold called "Hold"
Define Over, Black

Hold Meat Over Fire until Black

Release "Fire"
Release "Meat"
Release "Hold"
UnDefine Black, Over

....ug.

As a Pascal fan, how did you take to Delphi or JavaScript?

"cquirke" <name.goes.here@nospam.iafrica.com> wrote in message news:6jh9mvgeteqp5pa2llplgvh9e1mvqkq5vi@4ax.com...
Didn't Gates basically (ha. a pun.) write the first version? I "found" Basic
on my first PC, and since it was there, I learned it Then I found debug,
and actually coded in debug, and generally poked around for mabey months?
before I found a real assembler.


Didn't Borland produce Paradox also?

hard to debug too.

Here too.

It's not that bad really. It's somewhat object oriented, but with a procedural
flow. BAT++. The trouble with bat is that you'd have to call on fire.exe. But
then VBS is somewhat limited too. You might get a plate but there's no way to
code a knife and a fork.

Colorado Bill is the Pascal fan! Delphi. I don't really know, but have been
forced to read it lately. Isn't it a pascal derivitive?

Javascript. I think I needed a bat to write to the registry once, and instead
of kludging with a reg file and regedit, I figured out a basic script.
Don't know a whole lot, but it's fairly easy to figure out when I need to do
something. A decent (and GUI) bat replacement.

Those aren't really my languages of choice though. What I want to do is get
back to C, and mabey look at C++ again, but then I frequently find myself
lurking in alt.lang.asm for some strange reason .

Bill Blanton <bblanton@REMOVEmagicnet.net> wrote in message news:#pV03LAfDHA.2260@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
The first BASIC program was run at Dartmouth at 2 am on May 4, 1964.
Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955, so he was 8 YRS old at the time.

Gates and Allen co-authored a Basic interpreter for the Altair in 1975.
By that time, Basic was over 10 YRS old.

"cquirke" <name.goes.here@nospam.iafrica.com> wrote in message news:2ieemv0fpicfb7tnl0l4r9r3gamkprb3np@4ax.com...
Mabey it had to do with MFC vs OWL? dunno, but no one is really safe from
the MS-machine. How can you compete with someone that has the code, and
the programmers that wrote the code, for the OS that you are mainly targetting.


Fire would no doubt need to be a driver or OS ring-0 function. I doubt
windows will let you call fire directly like that ;-)


I don't worry about that too much, but ikwym. There are also third party
utils to convert a vbs to an exe, iirc, but that's taking it too far..

"cquirke" <name.goes.here@nospam.iafrica.com> wrote in message news:2ieemv0fpicfb7tnl0l4r9r3gamkprb3np@4ax.com...
Mabey it had to do with MFC vs OWL? No one is safe from the MS-machine.
How can you compete with someone that has the code, and the programmers
that wrote the code, for the OS that you are targetting.

Fire would no doubt need to be a driver or OS ring-0 function. I doubt
windows will let you call fire directly like that ;-)


I don't worry about that too much, but ikwym. There are also third party
utils to convert a vbs to an exe, iirc.

"Hugh Candlin" <no@spam.com> wrote in message news:u9$aWuBfDHA.616@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...
So it wasn't Gates then?

Oh. ok ;-)

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 20:25:08 -0400, "Bill Blanton"
It wasn't a crisis in the DOS era, because you could simply ignore DOS
most of the time. The DOS loader parked you in RAM, gave you the keys
to your segments, and left you to get on with it. You could ask DOS
for services, or BIOS, or roll your own at the hardware level.

With Windows, the OS intrudes into the way your program looks and
feels, and in effect, the roles are reversed. Instead of being in
control and choosing to call (or do without) DOS services, the OS was
in control and called your code via the message queue.

Borland had OWL for Windows and something similar for DOS. In
Windows, it was more a wrapper around the inescapable Windows API
(along with a few Borland UI things like those big brassy button
bitmaps, etc.) But in DOS, it was Borland's own UI code.


Now I happen to agree with the reasons put forward as to why the role
of the OS was increased. It wasn't that without Windows, DOS apps
would have an awful (G)UI; several apps showed it was possible to
provide an effective UI in DOS. But you had to roll your own, and for
every conventional Alt+letter menu UI, there would be some ghastly
tribal UI from hell such as perfected by Word Pervert.

Having Windows to provide a consistent look and feel meant that app
vendors could concentrate on functionality, making the selection of
software more than just a swimsuit parade. And once you provided
system-wide fonts, and driver suppport for divergant hardware, it was
like taking the handbrake off hardware development.

But it does increase the role and control of the OS, and suddenly it
matters that there's only one player involved.


In those days, MS did not look like a monopoly threat to me.
Borland's compilers were rated as faster and seemed more widely-used
in the DOS days; MS clustered with Watcom and a few others.

But compilers are there to facilitate rapid and effective software
development, and when you saw how Borland's application development
pace was fltering in the Windows arena, well... that indicated that
maybe all was not well there. "Have you seen the Paradox for Windows
beta?" would be the standing joke at expos - it was perennially in
beta, always "improving", always not quite ready for release yet.

I suspect OOP wasn't quite delivering the expected ease of
development, and that the performance downside was a problem that
tipped the balance further. OOP is supposed to shed some code
efficiency in return for fewer unexpected crashes, ability to re-use
existing code, and thus shorted development time, but certainly
Borland's own Paradox progress appeared to suffer from the problems
that OOP was supposed to fix.

Yep - I've seen .bat and VB compilers too. Hell, even in the pre-PC
days it was a joke that some wannabe geeks who claimed to write
"machine code" (waving 25k "hullo world" apps around as proof) were
really just compiling their BASIC :-)

In case anyone didn't get the joke, 25k is bloatware in a world of 48k
memory maps (with 7k of that used for graphics). I wrote a screen
dump utility that supported three different resolutions that fit
exactly into a 256 byte print buffer; took three days to write and
debug, and about a week to shrink it down from 270 bytes to fit, and
it was *exactly* 256 bytes long when done.

"cquirke" <name.goes.here@nospam.iafrica.com> wrote in message news:f7qjmvcvo7nf177c7puqpvcagr0koldiv0@4ax.com...
Borland also did a name change (Inprise) which didn't help the situation. I
guess they didn't realize the weight that the Borland name carried (or had
once carried). They changed it back to Borland after a year of so as Inprise.


:-))

"Pre-PC"? 48K memory map? What strange platform was that?

Bill Blanton wrote:
I don't know, but I *do* know my VIC-20 had 3583 bytes free (with no program in
memory)! :-)

"Bill in Co" <none@earthlink.net> wrote in message news:O2xIdUxfDHA.3216@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
Commodore? My dad had a Commodore-64. With cassette tape storage!

"Bill in Co" <none@earthlink.net> wrote in message news:e#c8q1xfDHA.2364@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
lmao... well then.. you are! lol..

IIRC, dad had a samll TV as a monitor.

I remember the cassette drive searching for files. Hopefully they weren't
near the end of a 30*2 minute tape.

On Fri, 19 Sep 2003 20:37:44 -0400, "Bill Blanton"
I heard that Khan was dumped from Borland when the ship was all but
sunk, and did his own thing on a reduced scale (as Inprise?). AFAIK
the only thing he took with him was SideKick.

ZX Spectrum; born 1982, and I did 1984-1988 on it :-)

"cquirke" <name.goes.here@nospam.iafrica.com> wrote in message news25pmvos2bp4iummt54292erqbl7do0mhk@4ax.com...
Borland trivia: From what I've heard, they "pioneered" the "r-click-context-menu".
Mabey Quattro-Pro? MS didn't take to it, but other developers started to incorporate
it in their programs. Of course, now MS is the "context king".


That's not too much lag for a young geek. ;-) I was doing DOS5.0 on a
Tandy while Windows 3.1 came and went. Then did 3.1 when 95 came out!


OT:
Hey! I did some lurking in acv today, reading up the latest on swen, (not much)
and came upon a post of yours concerning biological vs. computer virus. If you
don't mind me asking, where did you learn all that?

(and did "Soog" really post what Laura said? JK, I don't really want to know
about all that. LOL...)

Bill Blanton <bblanton@REMOVEmagicnet.net> wrote in message news:#Q#Upv#fDHA.1832@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
Aw, that's nuthin.

I ran Windows 1.0 on a Intel 186.

Barefoot....in the snow....uphill....both ways.....

On Sat, 20 Sep 2003 22:56:10 -0400, "Bill Blanton"
I love the right click - though I know it's all too much for Mac users
to cope with, having to think about two buttons :-)

Quattro Pro for DOS is one of may fave programs of all time - it
completely wiped the floor with Lotus, and it was only Excel's outline
feature that prompted me to switch at that time. I still have Excel
as part of Office 95, but switched to the last free Star Office.

My first PC OS was PICK R83, then MS-DOS 3.3 - I took to Win95
immediately though (the week it came out I built myself a new
486DX4-100 system to run it) as that was when I entered the industry
as a pro. I saw it as a chance to leapfrog the "experience" problem!

By then I'd done years of hard time in Win3.0 and Win3.1 (ehhhh)

Medical school :-)

I've taken to I(gnoring) several of the OT threads there, so I missed
the fun. There's just too much traffic at the moment, much as I enjoy
the sparring (and Laura's posts can be hilarious, as are her links)



in it, does not go away (PKD)

"cquirke" <name.goes.here@nospam.iafrica.com> wrote in message news:tk6rmv09nu1dbmkmhlej4e89224kpu6s30@4ax.com...
:-)) Yep, with a well designed program you rarely have to use the
laborious menu interface.

I learned 123 for DOS. Soem of my spreadsheets have too many
complex macros to switch from Lotus now. Star Office is good, but
they should still be giving it away . I don't think it has had enough
exposure to seriously compete.

I don't know how it was over there, but when 95 came out in the US,
(iirc), there were people getting in line the night before. Like for concert
tickets. "Start me up!..." ;-)


Impressive. You could tell in your post that you knew what you were talking
about. (geez..I hope I never get an eye infection ;-)

Scanning your message (when I started out looking for font messages), I
caught Borland and Sidekick, so thought if you were familiar with Sidekick
perhaps you could point me in the right direction to get help.

I'm running Sidekick '98 and Windows '98SE. While trying to solve a "pop up
dialer" problem yesterday, I changed my video driver, then changed it back
when that didn't help, and then later downloaded the DirectX critical
update. The next time I brought up Sidekick, the screen font for the "To
Do" items in my calendar has changed to something all caps and chunky. It's
a killer to read. Sidekick has options to change the fonts in Weekly and
Monthly views, but they are OK there, it's just the Daily view that is
messed up, and there is no option I can find for changing that. The printed
font is fine, it's just the screen font. Any ideas??

BTW, I still have a boxed set of Paradox (of course it's been in my garage
for 20 years, so the disks may not be too good anymore), and I retain
Sidekick 2.0 and run it in a DOS window because I like the way it prints my
address books better than '98.

I guess you and I are both "oldies but goodies", heh?

Vicki Husted

"cquirke" <name.goes.here@nospam.iafrica.com> wrote in message
news25pmvos2bp4iummt54292erqbl7do0mhk@4ax.com...

On Sun, 21 Sep 2003 19:56:57 -0400, "Bill Blanton"
Getting quite ASCII-artistic :-)

Yes, IKWYM - not seen any of the post-free versions. The last free
one is still quite slow to load... there's also the OpenOffice
spin-off that's still free, and one of my larger-installation clients
(a 15-seat small newspaper) has dumped Office for OpenOffice.

I was in Australia at the time, and it was just like that... saw the
box, bought a copy when I got back - the only non-OEM OS I have from
MS, heh. Another big client (small 4-seat LAN but working hard in
Excel doing movie budgets) insisted on installing it straight away,
sight unseen, because Win3.yuk was driving them MAD. They had a
baroque custom Excel application that leaked resources like an open
tap, and were having to exit and restart Win3.yuk every 2 hours... I
was quite worried about the plunge, but Win95 delivered++ there.

I was already interested in malware because of the disasterous pattern
of impact it can have on a tech's workload - suddenly, all of your
clients need you immediately, all at the same time - but it deepened
when I did an altavista search to read up on CAP.

Several really interesting articles almost made sense for some
paragraphs until I realised they were about bioviruses (altavista had
found the CAP in the word CAPsule, which comes up often there).

That made me realize just how deep and appropriate the "virus" analogy
was, and things clicked into place within my head - the way that the
infosphere acts as a semi-artificial Darwin machine (the artificiality
being that mutations are made, and don't arise spontaneously).



optimist left on the planet. <casmill2>

On Sun, 21 Sep 2003 17:41:20 -0700, "Vicki Husted" <Vicki_H@msn.com>

Husted? Pronounced "Hew-stead" rather than "Huss-ted"? Any relation
to the late Hugh Husted and his late widow Shirley?

Shirley was my aunt. I thought she was way cool :-)

Oops, false positive!

Quite a lateral approach... AFAIK the DirectX fix is to stop
deliberately malformed media files auto-running code via yet another
unchecked buffer screwup (ToDo: Must check all those buffers)

Yes. Borland often "added value" to the Windows API in various ways,
i.e. they'd not only wrap all the standard API calls in their own code
to give it the Borland "feel", but they'd have their own frills such
as small-allocation memory pooling, icon caching and so on.

Many Borland apps of that period had a particular UI look and feel as
well, with larger OK and Cancel buttons bearing big green tick and red
X bitmaps and so on. My guess is that some of these bitmaps have been
pre-cached somewhere, and that changing the display details has
somehow ambushed this so that this static material no longer "works".

What you'd want to do is force a flush and rebuild of this cached
material. Changing display color depth may do that, or changing the
icon or other UI element size via Display, Properties, Appearance.

The other possibility is that it's Borland's library code that is
calling into display services in a way that's no longer compatible at
the driver level. If that's the case, you may get a Bad/OK/Bad
response on test-to-fix challenge-and-undo. Something like...

Initial state - "This sucks!"
Reduce SVGA acceleration a notch - "Hey, cool!"
Increase SVGA acceleration back to default - "This sucks!"

....whereas if it was some sort of static data refresh then you'd get
Bad/OK/OK as the result pattern.

Yep - if it ain't broke, enhance it until it does :-)

"cquirke" wrote...
...the >> make a nice geometric pattern. ;>>)

Is it very similar StarOffice? I don't understand the tie-in. Sun built
StarOffice on OpenOffice source? Looks interesting, http://www.openoffice.org/
but the download is ~65MB! Mabey when/if I ever get cable or dsl. ;-)

On a similar note, Japan, S. Korea, and China are meeting. If they can get it
together, they might build their "own" Asian version of Linux. Understandably,
they don't like the idea of a western/US corporation (MS) holding the locks
and keys to their info-structure.


Looking back, I wish I had made that plunge too. I didn't really understand
the importance of that version at the time. I just thought it was an upgrade
to 3.1 with a stupid new versioning scheme. (I didn't realize then it could
get more stupid ;-)

I never had much use at all for Windows, until I installed Netscape! (or mabey
it was Mosaic). I was happy in DOS, connecting to various free BBSs with
Telix. Mabey booting to 3.1 once in a while out of curiosity. Inevitably I
downloaded/ installed a copy of Netscape/Mosaic and was running
win.com ;-) more and more.


Bio-machine analogies are very interesting. Especially with a "thinking"
machine. Networks and adaptive systems. AI. Code that writes code based on
evolutionary rules. Turing machines and cellular automatia. Remember Conway's
Game of Life?

IINM, there exist sorting algorithms that can "learn" the best(fastest) way to
sort a collection of strings, and so in effect they evolve.
Ug. Me no understand how.. but it's interesting stuff..