Posted on 08/17/2016 10:29:43 AM PDT by zeugma
I was poking around some old data today from some old backups, and I ran across something the old time computer folks will recognize and thought I'd share.
Many, many moons ago, before the internet was much more than a few government systems set up to 'talk' to each other, we still had PCs and stuff, believe it or not. Granted, compared to the system you can buy for a few hundred dollars today from just about anywhere on the internet, they weren't much, but they were what we had.
There were also things called "magazines" printed on thinly sliced dead trees. These covered just about any topic you could imagine, so of course, there were some dedicated to computers.
In some of these periodicals, you'd sometimes have little programs printed that you could, if you were careful and didn't make any mistakes, enter into an editor on your computer, save, compile and execute. Some were so tiny that if you were using a computer that used the DOS operating system, you could enter into a program called "debug", and almost immediately execute them. Debug was a really powerful and dangerous program, because it would give those who invoked it direct access to just about any scrap of memory or disk on your computer. Used injudiciously, you could easily trash your hard disk, or worse.
Because DOS didn't really have much intelligence to it, it was difficult to write interactive scripts. So, over time I put together a collection of tiny utilities to make my batch files smarter. One such program would read what key you entered, and output the scan code of the key as an error code. So, you could have your batch file prompt for input, then take different actions depending upon what the user entered.
here's the code for "key.com".
N KEY.COM E 0100 B4 00 CD 16 EB 0E 77 06 3C 60 76 02 E 010C 24 DF 3C 00 75 02 88 E0 B4 4C CD 21 RCX 0018 W Q
If you entered the above into a plain text file, and saved it as KEY.SCR, then enter the following from a DOS prompt:
DEBUG < KEY.SCR
you would end up with a program called KEY.COM that would interpret and echo keystrokes to help your batch files a little smarter than they otherwise would be.
The program, KEY.COM is tiny, weighing in at a whopping 24 bytes. However, it's diminutive size did not adversely affect it's utility. An even smaller pair of programs were something I called "WARM.COM" and "COLD.COM". They would reboot your PC immediately. 'Warm.com' was the equivalent of pressing the [ctrl]-[alt]-[delete] key, which would reboot without performing a full POST (Power On Self-Test). 'Cold.com', on the other hand, was like powering your computer off and back on.
If you were to run the following through DEBUG as shown above, you'd create both programs.
N WARM.COM E 0100 B8 40 00 8E C0 26 C7 06 E 0108 72 00 34 12 EA 00 00 FF E 0110 FF RCX 0011 W N COLD.COM E 0100 B8 40 00 8E C0 26 C7 06 E 0108 72 00 00 00 EA 00 00 FF E 0110 FF RCX 0011 W Q
It is easy to spot the difference between the two programs. The bottom line, was that the program told your computer to jump to a certain memory location. The different locations controlled the different boot types.
One final debug script I'd like to mention is 'BEEP.COM'. It wasn't the most powerful program in the world, as it had one simple job to do. It would make your computer speaker beep once. That's it. What is cool about it (to me any way) was that the entire executable was a whopping 6 bytes! To this day, I've never seen a smaller functional program. Here it is, in all it's awesome and tiny glory:
N BEEP.COM E 0100 B8 07 0E CD 10 C3 RCX 0006 W Q
The dates associated with the files indicates how long ago I was talking about...
-rw-r--r-- 1 zeugma zeugma 6 Jan 28 1994 BEEP.COM -rw-r--r-- 1 zeugma zeugma 56 Mar 11 1995 BEEP.SCR -rw-r--r-- 1 zeugma zeugma 17 Dec 22 1991 COLD.COM -rw-r--r-- 1 zeugma zeugma 94 Feb 13 1996 COLD.SCR -rw-r--r-- 1 zeugma zeugma 24 Dec 6 1992 KEY.COM -rw-r--r-- 1 zeugma zeugma 17 Dec 22 1991 WARM.COM -rw-r--r-- 1 zeugma zeugma 94 Feb 13 1996 WARM.SCR
Yah I remember doing this too...if I remember right they would have separate listings for separate system...I had a commodore 64 (preceded briefly by the vic 20) during the early 80's and remember the joy of hunching over the kitchen table and entering that code. And I was in hog heaven when I got the tape drive.
You know much more about it than I do.
I used to work for Bendix Avionics in Ft. Lauderdale, now called Allied Aerospace last I heard.............
MY telecom and HF experience was with the AF 1968-1976. My other telecom experience was after I graduated from Georgia Tech with a BSEE and specialized.
You’re experience is on the transmitting end and mine is on the receiving end!................
We had BOTH transmitter farms and receiver farms. The receiver farms were extensive because of the need for frequency and wavelength diversity.
Our UHF, VHF and HF systems were TWO-WAY with at least three distant locations.
Instead I ended up writing an 8080 simulator. I was able to load and run the Zapple Monitor, but couldn't get a version of BASIC to run. I must have coded a bug somewhere, but not having the source listing for the BASIC made it very impractical to troubleshoot.
My youngest grandson is one year old. I hope to last long enough to show him some of this archaic technology.
Our customers don’t do a lot of ‘transmitting’ but they do a hell of a lot of ‘listening’, er, receiving........................
Okay...I know what you do now.
XTree was absolutely the best file management program I ever used. For the type of coding we were doing at the time, you could edit individual text files from within the program, navigate all over the place - it was perfect.
Lol, naww I went full PC when I could build my own, never really looked back.
I still use it! on old computers we have...............
I'll test this one tonite.
Hahaha, cute.
You were eaten by a grue.
now, that was interesting. It's one of the reasons I like threads like this. All kinds of interesting nibblets of information out there amongst Freepers!
You are a youngster. I used 8” floppy disk when DSDD was 512k buyes.
Only 8 inchers that I was exposed to was on DECs. But like the punchcards and tapes, I never owned a machine that used them - it was always someone else’s hardware. And I never could afford a Magcard.
These kids do not know such old technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb1e-QJotL4
I opened my own computer consulting business in 1983 with a brand spanking-new IBM PC with 2 360k Floppies (5.25in), a 10MB Hardcard Drive (PCI Slot) and MS-DOS 2 and a green phosphor monitor. WOW!
My most useful tool was Borland’s Sidekick TSR - a swiss army knife utility that was a calendar, notepad and other apps that could be bounced in and out of while working on another program. Main job was writing dBase and Lotus 1-2-3 applications. Later used Clipper to compile the dBase for speed and security.
Quit the business when I realized that I had 2 silent partners, the IRS and state taxing authorities. They never helped out but boy, did they want tax returns and money. Somewhere along the line, I misfiled paperwork about paying myself and the IRS & state wanted past due unemployment taxes. UGH!
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