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Old farts reminiscing about computers
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GlmnAlyAirCar
Active Member
I took a shortcut. Rather than doing a filesystem filter driver (for which documentation was almost totally unavailable), I did it at the partition level. I filtered the disk partition I was attaching to and performed encryption/decryption for each write/read.
One simple copy protection thing I did for games on VIC-20 and C-64 cartridges was to spinkle the code with random writes back onto the program itself.
When the game ran in the ROM cart it would have no effect (read only), but if someone copied the game into RAM it would become unstable and start crashing.
When the game ran in the ROM cart it would have no effect (read only), but if someone copied the game into RAM it would become unstable and start crashing.
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First computer guided electric car I built was a refurbished as-is RC truck from Radio Shack, Used my birthday money buy the parts to make a perf board and hand laid out self etched PCB interface card between our Color Computer 2 and the joystick. Could then use the computer joystick and/or BASIC to drive truck around. I miss that Radio Shack...
I ripped out the analog dashboard in my Rx7, and replaced it with a C64 motherboard controlling all display functions. Had a tiny CRT with bar graph tach, digital speedo, etc.
Wrote all the software to run it in machine code.
The C-64 keyboard was a "matrix" (not serial) so it has columns and rows of sense lines. I used those lines hooked up to things like crank angle sensor, transmission speed pickup, fuel flow meter, etc.
Oh, and I had a light show mode where I could make all the exterior lights do dancing patterns.
(Learned about SCRs and IGBTs so I could make the 5v control lines work the 12v car lights.)
I drove it that way for a few thousand miles, then decided I liked the analog better, and ripped it all out and put analog gauges back in.
That was a lot of effort goofing around on the car.
Wrote all the software to run it in machine code.
The C-64 keyboard was a "matrix" (not serial) so it has columns and rows of sense lines. I used those lines hooked up to things like crank angle sensor, transmission speed pickup, fuel flow meter, etc.
Oh, and I had a light show mode where I could make all the exterior lights do dancing patterns.
(Learned about SCRs and IGBTs so I could make the 5v control lines work the 12v car lights.)
I drove it that way for a few thousand miles, then decided I liked the analog better, and ripped it all out and put analog gauges back in.
That was a lot of effort goofing around on the car.
I learned assembly in college, hand assembling and entering code via hex keypad into a 1K byte Heathkit 6800 microprocessor trainer. These days i have almost as much fun with a 'Particle Photon' or Raspberry Pi.
Have used assembler recently on x86-64 where it is needed for access to hypervisor/OS platform magic documented in Volume 3 of the Intel architecture specs. Thank goodness 64bit C compilers no longer support inline assembly instructions.
Yes, I was at the MS PDC in Moscone center in '93. Specifying 16MB of RAM for a new white box 486SX required me to just tell the local expert to trust me that I really did need the whooping 16MB. The Adaptec SCSI adapter and a CDROM drive weren't cheap either. All of this so I could install the NT3.1 from 3 floppies and CDs. And after numerous failed attempts, learn that one or more of four memory SIMMs had some bad bits, so I could get them replaced. Back to trust me, this extended memory test doesn't like this memory nor does NT so please replace these. After that NT could actually use the memory reliably and finish the install. It was initially difficult to abandoned my dream of buying a Macintosh but NT helped me get over that crush. ;-)
Yeah, my daughter's high school peers (pre Y2K) couldn't relate to her just connecting to the www (via transparently shared ISDN 64KB) and printing papers on the shared home printer. BTW 64KB was way better (connected in a second, and actually that fast) than 56KB dial up ever was.
The last four digits of my cell phone are easy to remember as they are the same 6502 as that ISDN phone number. Even though this Motorola fanboi (6809 TRS80 COCO in '81, 68000 AtariST in '86) never learned or actually used a 6502 processor.)
SpiceWare
Member
Similar here, though a few years earlier on an Amiga 2000HD. I recall most PC users were dismissive of multitasking at the time, I think they still mostly using DOS.
Hehe... I also had an ISDN BRI installed at my house. Two 64Kbps B-channels, and a 16K signaling channel. It also had an analog RJ-11 port and could provide a local loop analog dial tone. I plumbed my house analog phone plant in to that.
USR sold an ISA based ISDN adapter that there were NT drivers for. It appeared to the OS as a WAN interface. I used RRAS to configure it as a demand-dial interface that would be brought up automatically on any outbound traffic that I was NAT'ing for the rest of the house (I of course ran twisted pair to all the rooms).
It would bond both channels together for a 128K connection, unless somebody either picked up the phone, or an incoming phone call came in. It would then drop down to 64K for the data connection, and service the phone call on the other. Once the call completed, it would re-bond.
I had my local email server set up with a scheduled job to send an ETRN SMTP message to my upstream mail store provider every 15 minutes or so, that way I'd get incoming mail delivery even if the connection wasn't up form other usage.
#nerdalert
After leaving Boeing I contracted around the Seattle area for 7 years or so. On one contract I worked with a guy who was "slumming it" because he was trying to get his income down due to a messy divorce battle. Up until the previous year he had been writing device drivers for Windows NT 4 and making very good money at it. He was up to 1/2 a mil a year, mostly industrial applications.
He had done a stint at Microsoft as a contractor and one of his coworkers had developed a package to create NT device drivers in his spare time. Sort of an SDK/wizard thing. When Microsoft found out about it, they tried to take it from him, but they had forgotten to give him an NDA when he started there so he was able to walk away with the software.
The last few years I've been working with some software that was originally written for Windows 1.0 back in the late 80s. It had been updated a few times, but I inherited a partial 32 bit port. Their released software was still 16 bit. The original software had been written to take advantage of the cooperative multitasking in 16 bit Windows. There were a few places where pre-emptive multitasking caused problems until the section was rewritten.
It took me a couple of years of going back to one instability problem to finally put it to rest. Fortunately it only happened in a situation users rarely did, but it was on my To Do list hanging over my head for a long time.
Lately I've been trying to figure out the details of DDE. Apparently there was a bad exploit that hit Office late last year. Searching for anything DDE related brings up articles about the exploit. I would prefer to eliminate it, but the software needs to work with some VB 6 programs that communicate with DDE.
It's still supported in Win 10, but it's considered legacy code. According to the articles I've read, Microsoft finally disabled DDE in an Office update in December. I suspect support in the OS might be going away soon too.
d21mike
Active Member
68 Now.
I started learning "Data Processing" on a IBM 407 Tabulating Machine (1972 after the Army - Drafted). I learned to wire them at Southern California Regional Occupational Center (SCROC). My first job had one of these and also a Univac 9200 Computer which was 80 column card based. I then learned how to program it with RPG at a local community college while upgrading from 4kb memory to 8kb memory (could do anything with 8kb) and the addition of Disk "Platters" (large single layer platters). I re-programmed our nightly process from cards to disk based. The trick with the disk drives was to clean them nightly to avoid read/write errors. Kind of scary when you only have a Grandfather / Father / Son backup system. Next job in 1975 was on a IBM 360 30 (upgraded to 65) using both RPG and COBOL. Still a coder.
I started learning "Data Processing" on a IBM 407 Tabulating Machine (1972 after the Army - Drafted). I learned to wire them at Southern California Regional Occupational Center (SCROC). My first job had one of these and also a Univac 9200 Computer which was 80 column card based. I then learned how to program it with RPG at a local community college while upgrading from 4kb memory to 8kb memory (could do anything with 8kb) and the addition of Disk "Platters" (large single layer platters). I re-programmed our nightly process from cards to disk based. The trick with the disk drives was to clean them nightly to avoid read/write errors. Kind of scary when you only have a Grandfather / Father / Son backup system. Next job in 1975 was on a IBM 360 30 (upgraded to 65) using both RPG and COBOL. Still a coder.
QEMM + DESQview. Windows 3.1 was so bad... LOL
I used to process and transfer Fido Mail all night long using a couple of dedicated phone lines and USRobotics Modems...
We used OS/2 for our Lotus Notes server, since it didn't run on anything else at the time.
It was actually pretty good... compared to C:\win
Oh yeah, I remember those days.
It was actually pretty good... compared to C:\win
Oh yeah, I remember those days.
SpiceWare
Member
Was quite involved with OS/2 from 1994-2003. I went to Warpstock a few times: 1997 Diamond Bar California, 1998 Chicago (photo of my sister-in-law, brother, and myself(sitting down dark purple, black with red text, green warpstock shirt seen below) during the drawing), 2001 Toronto, and 2002 Austin (photo of me during my emulation presentation).
I ported a number of emulators starting with Stella (Atari):
ColEm (ColecoVision)
MasterGear (Sega Master System, Game Gear, SG1000 and SC300)
VGB (Game Boy) not animated - this was around the time I migrated to OS X and I never finished this port, though I did release a couple "sneak peeks":
I ported a number of emulators starting with Stella (Atari):
ColEm (ColecoVision)
MasterGear (Sega Master System, Game Gear, SG1000 and SC300)
VGB (Game Boy) not animated - this was around the time I migrated to OS X and I never finished this port, though I did release a couple "sneak peeks":
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