Not as old as RTTY, but it worked for a whopping 400 baud!............
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
Those guys were like ‘gods’ to the ‘rest of us’....................
I even had a subscription to PC Computing!...............
Beware of the overpunch.
Every once in a while I still run into that for inbound data feeds. Try to explain that to some college rookie.
In order to get Aces over the Pacific (a DOS game) to run on my windows 3.1 386, I had to boot as DOS and then become a bit of a memory expert. I shifted all sorts of stuff to something called himem and other stuff. It needed around 580k of memory to run and the machine only had 640k or something like that.
Sure was a fun game, once I got it going.
Further, If you can’t remember ring core magnetic memory then you ain’t old school. :0)
I still write in QBASIC, for old test programs here at work that run on old computers!...............
Wow, yer old
Octal lives!
Try to find someone adept at decoding RTTY.
That I do!
Read wire, Write wire and circular magnetism!..............
To be honest, I kind of envied the guys who got to play with their own micro-computers. I didn’t really get into that until about 1990-91 or so. That said, I liked the VAX. I was pretty much on my own, there, and it was a good solid system. Mainframe sucked. Hated handing tapes to the High Priests in White Robes. At least I never had to hand them card decks ...
Hard drive? You must be a young pup.
I used SSDD 5.25 inch floppies. Just line up the index hole with the hole in the cover, and you could safely store them by thumb tacking them to your cork board.
And my father was backing up to his audio cassette drive.
Not as old as RTTY, but it worked for a whopping 400 baud!............
It is damned difficult to find the means to read and rewrite what’s on a ring core memory in this millennium.... believe me, I’ve tried. Ended up assuring the enire system worked (unpowered at that) before recording the output. The technology just isn’t there any more.
Onoz. I used one of those.
My AF days in Telecom were at much lower speeds. 300 baud was called DSTE in my days. New fangled superspeeds called Digital Subscriber Terminal Equipment. My experience then was at 60 and 100 WPM.....baud rates were different when they were encrypted. (Removed the stop space).
LOL! That's what they were like everywhere it seems...........never saw them do anything. They just stayed inside their 'room' all day and came out (you couldn't go in!) for coffee and lunch!..................
Yep. PC Write in MS-DOS was uptown. After that, the military went to Enable, a sucky DOS based suite.
Before that, Commodore 64 with no hard drive, just a floppy. Hundreds of lines of code that had to be typed in letter perfect from Commodore 64 magazine in order to play Choplifter.
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