computer KO

We had a guy who loved playing "Empire", which tied up the VAX CPU. He renamed it to hide it from the sysadmin, (and anyone else who had somehow acquired admin priviledges, who might that be??) but the process's huge size still gave it away. When I needed to compile I discouraged him from playing during work hours by instant-messaging enough FormFeeds to blank his screen for 10 minutes.

The best prank, by a programmer much cleverer than me, made text characters occasionally appear to break loose and fall to the bottom of the screen. jsw

I didn't think I'd ever go back to Notepad until I encountered that. jsw

On my first homebrew I initially had to manually enter in the 32-byte bootstrap loader with the address and data toggle switches, so it could read in a Teletype tape.

Boy did I tire of that fast! First I wired up an octal keypad, then I scrounged two 5101 CMOS static RAM samples (256x4!) and kept them alive with NiCads.

Assembly programming lost its challenge when the 2Kx8 6116 came out. jsw

"Michael A. Terrell" on Sat, 15 Jun 2013

Oh yeah, that's it, tell my about the "good old days" when you didn't have enough room to even _have_ electrons ...

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Gawd, I meant "double quote". I must have been lying down when I read that to see an equal sign.

They must have fixed that at some point because I used to do searches with both asterisks and question marks to find specific files way back when. And it worked.

Oh, another pre-Win program I used to love was Norton Commander. Soooo much easier than other filemanglers or straight DOS.

I hate it when the computer does that. =:0

Positrons? Hell, we could barely afford the cheaper, less-shiny, secondhand electrons.

I found NoteTabPro about 15 years back and have used it happily ever since. It has all sorts of quick ascii text treatments to play with. Removing spaces, removing carriage returns, global text replacement, etc.

When I was little if we wanted electricity we rubbed a stray cat. I didn't have enough string to collect it by flying a kite, which is probably fortunate.

Now I save every piece of string I find, so I'll never be a powerless little kid again.

I learned to type DIR [whatever] first, then change DIR to DEL if I liked the results. jsw

"Michael A. Terrell" on Sat, 15 Jun 2013

??? How does Notepad run an infected file? It was a text editor, IRIC - or did I miss something? (Not surprising, if I did.)

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

The QAZ trojan renames Notepad to note.com and then itself to notepad.exe. It may have a different date than the rest of the system files. jsw

Notepad would run macros.

"Jim Wilkins" on Sun, 16 Jun 2013 07:50:30

-0400 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Ah. "clever".

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

"Michael A. Terrell" on Sun, 16 Jun 2013

Oh. One more thing I missed.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Oh! The double quotes were because I included it in the line with the surrounding text, so you could tell when the command started and ended. If it really matters, I usually put the command indented on its own line, with a blank line above and below. But it did not seem to matter in this case. :-)

Searches are not deletes. In unix the wildcarding is built into the shell. In MS-DOS, the wildcarding is built into each command, and one may implement it differently from another. :-)

I did not spend that much time on MS-DOS, let alone on Windows.

:-)

Yep, They've never perfected the DWIM instruction. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Hopefully, they implemented the wildcarding the same in both commands. :-)

I've always preferred the unix way of doing it -- putting the wildcarding in the shell, so it always behaves the same, as long as you stick with that one shell. And the implementation of the wildcarding seems to be the same in all the common shells, /bin/sh, /bin/bash/ /bin/ksh, /bin/zsh, /bin/csh and /bin/tcsh. I tend to prefer tcsh as a working shell, and zsh for writing scripts. (In part because zsh will honor the tcsh looping structure:

foreach j ( list of things by wildcarding or typing them all ) commands working on $j or not end

Instead of the sh/ksh/bash way of:

for j in list of things by wildcarding or typing them all do commands working on $j or not done

Zsh will do it either way, mixed in the same script even, as long as you have the "CSH_JUNKIE" environment variables set. :-). It will also invoke command history the csh/tcsh way as well.

Enjoy, DoN.

My first machine was an Altair 680b kit, which came with a monitor program in EPROM (a 1702 -- 256x8). But there was a jumper on board so if it were in one position, all the monitor would do on the CPU receiving the reset was set up the stack and then branch to a specific address -- 0x0000 IIRC. You could put the programs in the RAM, and examine the contents with front panel switches and LEDs. The original system came with all of 1K RAM (8 2102s) -- and while that could be strapped to live anywhere in the address space except where the EPROM or the I/O ports lived, the default was starting at 0x0000, and stretching all the way to 0x03FF. The stack was set to 0x00FF by default -- sometimes a nuisance.

The clock was pulled down to a mere 500 KHz, because the 1702s would go no faster, and they did not implement a clock-stretching option to allow running at the full 1MHZ with the slow EPROMs. (There were sockets for four of them, and at one time I had all four populated.)

The 16K SMB (Static Memory Board) made a big difference, along with a minimal editor and assembler, or an 8K BASIC interpreter from our long-time nemesis -- Bill Gates of Microsoft. :-) Eventually, the 1K got re-strapped to live well above everything else, to be a buffer and variable storage for the digital cassette tape interface which I made, which was fast enough to save either BASIC or the assembler/editor with an image of the whole of the 16K RAM, so I did not bother implementing the ability to save a program by itself. Save it embedded in whichever so it was easier to get started on the project the next day.

Floppys, and later hard disks, with SSB's DOS-68/DOS-69 or OS-9 were a tremendous improvement. And I learned a lot of tricks from things like how the SSB OS stored files on the floppies, and kept track of unused sectors.

Very different from either how unix did it, or the MS-DOS FAT filesystem.

No real experience with the 6502 instruction set, for all that it was pretty close to the 6800 one. But my CNC lathe, an Emco-Maier Compact-5/CNC did it all with a 6502. No surprise that it is rather kludgy.

They were useful substitutes for the 2Kx8 EPROMS to test how well a program would work there before committing it to EPROM.

And my final memory card for the 6809/OS-9 system was a board of nothing but those and some glue logic, including bus driver/receiver chips. Ran a lot cooler, and did not oxidize the Molex bed-of-nails bus connectors nearly as rapidly.

O.K. Sun used to use a CMOS RAM and a TOD clock chip with a coin cell potted into it to keep data -- for up to ten years. A lot better if you kept the system on full time, so the line power kept the memory and clock chip fresh. Two critical items were stored in there, the HostID, and the ethernet MAC address. If it lost those, you had to get a new one, and come up with fake values which were still valid enough so the OS configured itself properly for the hardware in the system board. :-) They now have SEEPROMS which need no backup power for that, or cards which plug in from the front with that, so you can switch licenses (if any) to a new box if the old one dies.

Yep -- the lithium cells can deliver unpleasant surprises. We were using them to power some experimental night vision devices, and one of them exploded on a conduit bus box running around the room supplying outlets. It certainly startled the fellow in the room. :-) I don't know what extra hazards they might provide in a closed environment like that -- aside from the damage and sudden failure of critical equipment. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Never had a problem. Both are internal to COMMAND.COM.

Anyway if the job needed more than a page of batch commands I did it in QBasic which is very similar to the Pascal I learned and used for serious programming. jsw