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
Much better ;’}
Or how about the Ohio Scientific C1P with 8K RAM, NO display, or disc drive with memory retention on a audio cassette player. Always booted into BASIC.
I remember that. Those old text adventures were fun at the time. :)
I remember seeing advertisements for it, but I never had enough money in those years to buy something like that. I know I wanted one.
I had to settle for the Quest "Super Elf." It took me awhile to save up the $100.00 it cost to buy it back in 1977.
> kill troll with sword
Yup. I was eaten by lots of grues. I died every way imaginable when playing Warp on my HP-3000. I tried playing my way through some it about a year ago when I found a server someone had made available via telnet, and found that I couldn’t remember squat. Warp was the best ‘mansion’ game I ever played. You could say things like ‘look at the ball and pick it up’ and it understood what you meant.
I agonized over the price of the C1P but the Mrs okayed it in’78.
Moved up later to a Casio laptop with mem expansion and ROM modules for spreadsheet and word processing that kept memory on a micro cassette. The display was a four line by 20 character lcd screen. I was in the US Army and became a computer tech for their mainframes, the IBM 360 initially and the the IBM 370 later on.
OF course that was all after my days on the ILLIAC IV project at NASA Ames in Palo Alto, CA.
“(I’m actually looking for the original Clinton Body Count file)”
See FReeper Alamo-Girl’s DSL website.
(”Downside Legacy at Two Degrees of Bill Clinton” is the cyber-notepad of FReeper Alamo-Girl.)
THE DOWNSIDE LEGACY ARCHIVES
http://alamo-girl.com/index.htm
Try this link for Body Count:
http://alamo-girl.com/0462.htm
and this one for dead list:
http://alamo-girl.com/0463.htm
Love it! Thanks for starting the thread.
Remember DoubleDOS and Desqview? I ran those so I could hack around while my BBS ran.
TheDraw for making excellent ANSI art
Waaay back in my Apple days using Ascii Express and my Applecat modem to trade W@rez at a screaming 1200 baud. Upgraded to 2400 baud from a modem sold by DAK Industries. I *loved* DAK!!!
Bonus points:
g=c800:5
Alamo-girl has good stuff, but the body count file predated most of the internet. Somewhere amongst my many archives I have the original post on a BBS where it started. I knew the person who originally compiled it back in the day. I’ll find it eventually.
Something someone said to me in a PM related to this thread got me thinking. That's always dangerous and can sometimes result in hours of time wasted on useless trivialities.
What came to my addled mind was that waaaaaaaaay back in the day when I had a 386dx, and I had lots of free time, I played around a bit with fractals. At the time the idea of generating graphics from fractal equations was actually kind of new, for the most part. There was this program, Fractint, a DOS program that could produce some really amazing images. It allowed you to zoom deep into these fractals and find some really interesting things at insane magnification levels. The software eventually incorporated logic such that it could do what they called "arbitrary precision" math. Essentially, it wasn't limited by the precision built into your computer, but could handle math with strings of numbers that were essentially of arbitrary length. Needless to say, when you were rendering a fractal and AP was engaged, the rendering slowed to a crawl. Of course, that didn't stop me. I'd set up a zoom, and walk away from my computer for a couple of days. The longest it ever took to render a single screen was about 60 hours.
At the time, I thought I was a fairly patient fellow with all this. Then years later I discovered what a truly Deep Zoom was. These guys would let a computer chug away on a render for hundreds, if not thousands of hours. On the aforementioned page, there is one mentioned called "spidrweb", that had rendered for 2413+ hours!(That's a little over 100 days!!!!!!) Yeah, I'm not nearly that patient. However, I currently do have a lot more horsepower today than I did with my scrawny 386. I've also got a multi-tasking computer that runs Linux, so it's plenty stable, and I'd be able to do other things while it ran. Looking at the Fractint page, there appears to be a fairly recent version of xfractint (which I'd tried several years ago and had been disappointed in). I downloaded, compiled and installed it. The current version does have some bugs and limitations, but seems to work pretty darned good.
So, armed with a modern fractint, and the ".par" values specified on the Deep Zoom page, I fired up fractint and let it run.
To say I was somewhat disappointed is a bit of an understatement. Using a 486dx took over a hundred days. My computer finished it in 3 hours 24 minutes. Yet again I'm mightily impressed with the advances in our computing power. It took less than 3 1/2 hours and the program is single-threaded. If the program had been designed to take advantage of all 8 cores of my processor, it would probably have taken 30 minutes. Not being much of a programmer, I can't say how much of a rewrite that would take.
Well, I guess it's time to delve deeper than I ever have before to see if I can find a level of zoom that will require a multi-day calculation....
That’s an interesting measure of how insanely powerful our common, “desktop supercomputers” have become.
Rewrite it to take advantage of a multi-hundred GPU equipped graphics card .....
Now that would be awesome. That hundred-day fractal, would probably render as fast as the screen could update.
I used gorilla glue to fix an abacus once
You weren’t the only one.
Plenty of us waited hours, days, or longer to generate fractals that today can be rendered in seconds now (if not real time frame rates).
Back then, I wondered what would happen if you devoted a then-supercomputer (filed a room, tens of millions of dollars) to a user interface. Now I’m using it to write this using one that fits in my pocket and cost a day’s wage.
I find f@h to be amazing. No way my parents would let me do that with the bedroom computer they never bought me when I wuz a kid.....
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