"Frank Gilliland" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 28 Aug 2004 14:16:56 -0400, "Leland C. Scott"
wrote in :


"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.


2-1/2 months? You should have learned disk access functions on a
COCO-II -- your program would have been up and running in about three
days. IOW, it's much easier if you bypass the BIOS calls and access
the disk directly.

I didn't use any OS calls at all. The only BIOS functions I used were direct
calls to read/write absolute disk sectors. Everything else I had to write
from scratch. As simple as the DOS file system was there was still a lot to
handle. What made thing more interesting was all I had to work with was a
Windows 98 machine. That made thing more complicated because Windows always
wanted to create long file names which messed things up a bit when you
format a disk. I had to put extra routines in to the code to filter that
crap out so when the disk was defragmented I had wiped all the Windows file
system extensions out, thus generating a valid DOS disk.



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'll agree, Windoze sucks for programming. The libraries required for
even simple programs, while easier to understand than DOS, are far
more extensive than the DOS interrupt list, direct hardware control is
almost impossible, and the OS overhead sucks up most of the processing
power.

No kidding!

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.


You might have enjoyed playing with a TI-990 I scrapped a couple
months ago.

Those were rather unique if I remember right they used a 16 bit micro at the
time. They even had an expansion box for add ons too.

--
Leland C. Scott
KC8LDO

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