"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!
--
Leland C. Scott
KC8LDO

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