Leland C. Scott wrote:
"Frank Gilliland" wrote in message
...

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004 20:30:50 GMT, jim wrote
in :


Leland C. Scott wrote:

"Twistedhed" wrote in message
...


Do or can you write and design software programs?


I did for class projects when I was working on my computer science

degree.

The biggest program was an integrated DOS utility for reading disk
parameters, viewing the raw sector data, showing what disk clusters

were

used by any file on the disk, and finally a disk defragmentation

function.

The program featured pop-up overlapping menus, hot keys, and mouse

control.

It was written in C++ and took me about 2-1/2 months to write working

on it

around 15 to 20 hours per week, design - test - debugging. And after

all

that it was specifically written for a 720K floppy disk so the

professor

could test it without killing his hard drive in case of bugs. All that

was

for a project for a class I took in operating systems. I think mine was

the

only one that worked and also handled subdirectories too. Even the 20+
something year old class computer geek wiz, and the professor's pet

student

no less, couldn't do it. I got the "look" from him in the hallway one

day at

the start of the next semester.

I haven't really gotten in to doing Windows programming, it's event

driven

verses procedural coded. That's a totally different animal. Windows
programming is a real pain, and complex if you really want to take full
advantage of the system. For simple programs that don't need a lot of

fancy

wiz-bang features Visual Basic is a good choice to use. The other

choices

are Visual C++, C#, or Java. The last three are object orientated

languages.

That could be a big chuck to bite off and learn for somebody who hasn't

done

any programming at all.

I've also done some Intel assembly language programming - 8080 and X86,

and

VAX-11 assembly too. Assembly language programming is to computers like
Morse Code is to Ham Radio. Now that I think about it the first

computer I

had was a Radio Shack TRS-80 with16K of memory. The first assembly

language

program I wrote, in Z80 assembly, was to translate text on the screen

into

Morse Code by keying the relay contact used to control the

record/play-back

function of the cassette recorder used for program storage.

jeez leland you are showing your age i fixed the hardware problems
associated with the 8080 processor on several military related programs.
hell we used uv ovens to clear the memories of chips.
the simulators the air force used drum drive technology and if the sims
were having a problem we took out an alan key and physically moved the
read/write heads until it worked. the damn drum drives were used in
grumman a6 aircraft also. hehehe looking back its a wonder that stuff
actually worked.


Do you remember "bubble memory"?


Sure do Frank, and all the hoopla about it becoming the next best thing in
memory storage. I've even run across some magnetic core memory cards. A
customer I visited, of the company I work for, had some they needed to get
repaired because they used it in an old minicomputer controlling some of the
equipment in the plant. I saw them in their electronics shop waiting to get
sent out to the computer manufacturer. The cores where about the sign of a
pin head, and the core select, and sense wires, had to be 40 gage, like hair
thin size. I think the core planes had to be hand built because of the tiny
size of the cores and the wire used. The memory cycle times from what one of
my books say was around 1 microsecond. And these were used in the mainframes
of the day. Compare that to present day memory chips!

now that leland mentions it they were also used on the simulators and
were literally called core memory. things weighed a ton and needed to be
reset very often using front panel switches.