"jim" wrote in message
t...
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.

Yeah, it does show my age all right. I remember doing my FORTRAN programs on
IBM key-punch machines when I was going to school for my EE degree in the
mid to late 70's. Those were the "good old days" not.


--
Leland C. Scott
KC8LDO

Wireless Network
Mobile computing
on the go brought
to you by Micro$oft