John W. Colby
jcolby at ColbyConsulting.com
Mon Mar 17 18:16:01 CST 2003
And in ~1983 or thereabouts, I built a fully 16 bit 16mhz 80186 based single board computer. I was poor and into electronics so I just built my own. The board had the processor, 256kb of Ram, 2 serial ports, a floppy controller and a HDD controller. Of course things were more expensive back then - I bought a dual 8" floppy for $700. Couldn't afford a hard disk, but really didn't need one. It all just sat out on my workbench / table with cables everywhere. It ran CPM and Turbo Pascal for CPM. That was my first real language and first real programming experience. I worked for Megatek Corporation back then, a graphics company out of Sorrento Valley in San Diego. I managed to inherit an engineering prototype graphics system (terminal) that talked to my system via a blazing fast 19.2 kbit serial port. The graphics controller actually had more power than my SBC with a dedicated 8086 processor, 1/2 mb ROm and 1/2 MB display list RAM. It had an entire graphics language that could define lines in three dimensions, rotate / scale and translate images and even do rudimentary shading and light sources. My first programming was to build a Turbo Pascal interface to all of the instructions of the display controller. About a year after I started programming I had it drawing a three dimensional sphere using joined polygons for the surface rotating and scaling up and down as I told it how to display the sphere. Quite the machine. I gave it up for an IBM PCXT 12 MHz with this new thing called IBM DOS. A HUGE step down in performance, but a HUGE step up in usability since it was a standard that people used in offices. I then bought Turbo Pascal for that as well as Word Perfect, DbIII+ and Lotus123 and never looked back. Quit the electronics world and took up programming for a living. John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: accessd-admin at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-admin at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of Stuart McLachlan Sent: Monday, March 17, 2003 6:55 PM To: Arthur Fuller; accessd at databaseadvisors.com Subject: RE: [AccessD] A2K: This should be easy I did my early DB development on CC/PM (Concurrent CPM) in Dataflex (again 20 years ago <g>). Two ICL PCs networked and you could hotkey between 4 different applications (and a whole 64K available to each) on each PC. On 17 Mar 2003 at 8:57, Arthur Fuller wrote: > Anyone in this list besides me old enough to remember CP/M? Those were the > days! Once I did a big app on a computer system called Molecular, that had a > multi-user version of CP/M and 10MB hard disks! Bitchin system. > > -----Original Message----- > From: accessd-admin at databaseadvisors.com > [mailto:accessd-admin at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Gustav Brock > Sent: March 17, 2003 8:15 AM > To: Stuart McLachlan > Subject: Re: [AccessD] A2K: This should be easy > > > Hi Stuart > > Oh, I'm old enough to know about Date and Time and DOS - and drivers for > add-on battery clocks for XT machines. > > What I didn't know was that these (Date and Time) were equivalent to those > of VBA; I've always regarded these as functions to only read the settings of > DOS (or WinNT+). > > /gustav > > > >> > Also, another little known fact about the Date, Time > >> > and Now functions. They work both ways. If you use this line of > >> > code: > >> > >> > Date=Date()+1 > >> > >> > You've just set your systems date to tomorrow! <grin> > >> > >> That is scary! I didn't know that. > >> Why do you know such weird things? > > > Because we've been using various BASICs for many years (in my case > > over 20) and once upon a time in DOS , we regularly used DATE and > > TIME to adjust the system clock. > > _______________________________________________ > AccessD mailing list > AccessD at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com > > _______________________________________________ > AccessD mailing list > AccessD at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com -- Stuart McLachlan Lexacorp Ltd Application Development, IT Consultancy http://www.lexacorp.com.pg _______________________________________________ AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com ---------------------------------------------------- Is email taking over your day? Manage your time with eMailBoss. Try it free! http://www.eMailBoss.com -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: winmail.dat Type: application/ms-tnef Size: 4032 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://databaseadvisors.com/pipermail/accessd/attachments/20030317/a4d97548/attachment-0001.bin>