An age test???
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Himem.sys Pick your C++ application memory model - small, medium, large, mixed. Spending hours with the order of loading drivers in config.sys to get them all in there. 640K!!!!
We had a DOS application, DBase II based, so large that the cover had to be taken off machine for it to fit in... You start the program. It crashes. After trying "everything", you give up and send the PC to the IT guys for hardware debugging. They take off the cover, get the probes in place, and everything works fine. They return the PC to the user: It fails. Back in the workshop, it works fine. After several round trips it was discovered that it works when the cover is off, fails when the cover is on. It took a few more rounds before the true explanation was found. In those days, many tower cabinet covers were shaped like an (upside down) U, running in tracks that forced you to pull it backwards all the way to get it off. This was a deliberate design to force you to unplug the power cord before opening the machine. You unplugged not just the power cord, but all sorts of cables - screen, printer, keyboard and whathaveyou. That's the clue: Windows 2.x had arrived, but most programs were still keyboard based. So was this DBaseII application. The IT guys, when testing the machine, opened it, plugged in power, screen and keyboard, but not the mouse - it wasn't needed for testing. The PC booted, the mouse driver initialized, found no mouse to talk to, so it unloaded itself, releasing a couple hundred bytes of RAM. Back at the office, everything including the mouse was plugged back in. The mouse driver did not release its space. When loading the DBase-application, there was no check, no error report that RAM size is too small, the program won't fit! Maybe an error return was genereated deep inside, but it never reached the user before the system crash was a fact. When the real problem - insufficient RAM - was identified, memory could be tweaked in other ways, to allow the mouse to remain plugged while this application was running. But for a couple of weeks, it was a great mystery to us how it could be that you had to remove the cover to make space for the program.
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When I built my first computer in the 70's (z80 based), I didn't have DOS. All I had was a 2K monitor called Zapple. I didn't have an assembler so I learned to program by the numbers. No external storage till I wire wrapped a card to write data to a cassette drive (I actually used a reel-to-reel). The system eventually grew into a CPM system with dual 8 inch floppy drives. Those were fun days.
One of my early jobs was with a company building minicomputers. Every manufacturer had their own OS in those days. I happened to discover a reproducible situation sending the OS into an infinite loop. I went to one of the OS guys, describing it, and he dug out a hardcopy printout of the source code. We did all application programming in high level languages then, but the OS was written in a language at somewhat lower than C - you could maipulate registers directly, and use inline assembler when needed. After about fifteen minutes of grunting, flipping back and forth bewteen the pages of the OS listing, he nodded a "yes!", grabbed his pen and wrote two numbers into the source code - two 16 bit values in octal format. I asked him what that was. "Oh, that's the patch for it". He had jotted down not the source code change. Not the assembler instructions that would be generated by the language compiler, but the octal codes for those assembler instructions. Why? Because he would try out the patch by poking directly into the running OS code of his test machine, and then it is very convenient to have the value ready in advance. Yeah, I suppose he was right. But he didn't need to look up the instruction code anywhere before jotting it down in the listing, so I guess he could have managed with the assembler instruction as well. But why bother with instruction names, when you know the instruction code.
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Anyone remember using a hole punch to turn a single sided floppy into a double sided one?
It's a hard life, but somebody's got to live it if only to act as an inspiration to others. Dan Best
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Richard Deeming wrote:
5¼" floppy
Huh! Nothing! Back in my days, we used 8" floppy disks! AND we had cold gravel for dinner! :laugh:
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
Mark Twain -
Yea, well, that's nothin'. Back in my day, before the 1 was discovered, we had to write all our programs using only 0s!! :-O
WRONG ! I'm so old, we learned to program using 0 and lower case l's. None of your fancy 1's for us. Too easy.
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We had a DOS application, DBase II based, so large that the cover had to be taken off machine for it to fit in... You start the program. It crashes. After trying "everything", you give up and send the PC to the IT guys for hardware debugging. They take off the cover, get the probes in place, and everything works fine. They return the PC to the user: It fails. Back in the workshop, it works fine. After several round trips it was discovered that it works when the cover is off, fails when the cover is on. It took a few more rounds before the true explanation was found. In those days, many tower cabinet covers were shaped like an (upside down) U, running in tracks that forced you to pull it backwards all the way to get it off. This was a deliberate design to force you to unplug the power cord before opening the machine. You unplugged not just the power cord, but all sorts of cables - screen, printer, keyboard and whathaveyou. That's the clue: Windows 2.x had arrived, but most programs were still keyboard based. So was this DBaseII application. The IT guys, when testing the machine, opened it, plugged in power, screen and keyboard, but not the mouse - it wasn't needed for testing. The PC booted, the mouse driver initialized, found no mouse to talk to, so it unloaded itself, releasing a couple hundred bytes of RAM. Back at the office, everything including the mouse was plugged back in. The mouse driver did not release its space. When loading the DBase-application, there was no check, no error report that RAM size is too small, the program won't fit! Maybe an error return was genereated deep inside, but it never reached the user before the system crash was a fact. When the real problem - insufficient RAM - was identified, memory could be tweaked in other ways, to allow the mouse to remain plugged while this application was running. But for a couple of weeks, it was a great mystery to us how it could be that you had to remove the cover to make space for the program.
Cool story, bro. IRL: :thumbsup:
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Of course. In the driving snow. On our knees. Over broken glass.
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Are you old ancient enough to find this funny?[^] :~
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
Mark TwainThat's the most ridiculous thing I ever hoyied
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I started that way -- with punched tape, a teletype and remote GE time-share system using some flavor of BASIC.
Been there, done that :-)
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We had a DOS application, DBase II based, so large that the cover had to be taken off machine for it to fit in... You start the program. It crashes. After trying "everything", you give up and send the PC to the IT guys for hardware debugging. They take off the cover, get the probes in place, and everything works fine. They return the PC to the user: It fails. Back in the workshop, it works fine. After several round trips it was discovered that it works when the cover is off, fails when the cover is on. It took a few more rounds before the true explanation was found. In those days, many tower cabinet covers were shaped like an (upside down) U, running in tracks that forced you to pull it backwards all the way to get it off. This was a deliberate design to force you to unplug the power cord before opening the machine. You unplugged not just the power cord, but all sorts of cables - screen, printer, keyboard and whathaveyou. That's the clue: Windows 2.x had arrived, but most programs were still keyboard based. So was this DBaseII application. The IT guys, when testing the machine, opened it, plugged in power, screen and keyboard, but not the mouse - it wasn't needed for testing. The PC booted, the mouse driver initialized, found no mouse to talk to, so it unloaded itself, releasing a couple hundred bytes of RAM. Back at the office, everything including the mouse was plugged back in. The mouse driver did not release its space. When loading the DBase-application, there was no check, no error report that RAM size is too small, the program won't fit! Maybe an error return was genereated deep inside, but it never reached the user before the system crash was a fact. When the real problem - insufficient RAM - was identified, memory could be tweaked in other ways, to allow the mouse to remain plugged while this application was running. But for a couple of weeks, it was a great mystery to us how it could be that you had to remove the cover to make space for the program.
haha that's good, thanks for posting
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Punch tape? You were lucky; we started with punched cards and a manual punch. We progressed to a 12 hole punch with numeric keys, where you could press multiple keys at once, and it automatically moved the card on one column. pic[^] Before that, we'd literally used a jig that held the card securely while you poked a square pokey-thing through the card over a cut-out behind; once you'd done all the holes for that column, you moved the card along by pressing a separate lever that moved it the right amount. As for ancient enough to understand the autoexec.bat joke, yes... but not to find it funny!
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Are you old ancient enough to find this funny?[^] :~
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
-----
The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
-----
Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
Mark Twain -
Of course. In the driving snow. On our knees. Over broken glass.
TWICE a day in my case, actually! I went home for lunch... :rolleyes:
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
-----
Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
Mark Twain -
in 83 I had a cpm system running at 4Mhz with an 8" floppy, But also a 10 MEGA BYTE external hard drive, with removable platters. Luxury. The rest of the system was crap. Filled up my car if I took it home to work. Ah. The good old days. ASM all the way.
My first PC had 16K of memory and used a audio-cassette player for storage. At least it was better than what the Navy had. Discrete component processers where the CPU weighed 60 pounds. Now those where the good old days when booting a computer meant kicking the side with your foot to settle the cards in place.:thumbsup:
