Posted on 12/02/2023 10:27:55 AM PST by Signalman
Computer Chronicles was a show on PBS back in the 1980s. This episode features, among others, an interview of Gary Kildall, the inventor of CP/M, an 8-bit operating system which preceded QDOS and MS-DOS, both of which were based on CP/M. Kildall was the founder of Digital Research Inc. (DRI).
Probably wouldn’t be trying to VAX everybody to death.
MD-DOS was probably the best of the early DOS O/S. I still remember it. And yes, I’m right there with you as a fellow dinosaur.
dBase II - another blast from the past
Not a fan of Word for Winders, but I liked Word for DOS better than Word Perfect or WordStar.
I recently put Win 98 on an old Compaq that I scrounged because I have software that won’t run on anything modern.
It was a struggle to find a image viewer that would be compatible, but I found FastStone which works great on 98 and everything else I’ve tried it on. I recommend it and it’s free!
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kawhill
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In the G kawhill wrote:
This is going to seriously date me, but my first computer was a Commodore 64, used to write programs in Basic
Same here...really took off though with turbo pascal on IBM clones in late 80s. Could go hours without a break programming.
My brother had an Altair 8800 back in the day.
I moved from dBase II and III+ to FoxPro
Learning and knowing Foxpro got me a couple of plumb jobs back in the day.
Commodore 64 was also my first personal computer. I was working on a GCOS 8 mainframe at the time. Actually, I still work on GCOS 8 mainframes. My team just installed a GCOS 8 mainframe in the Google Cloud so it can be used by a some subcontractors in India.
The Commodore 64 was well engineered. I was able to use it to do stochastic performance modeling of software on our mainframe.
Dog gone man, i programmed in pascal, still got a book. This whole thread is like info overload.
Digital Research was originally Intergalactic Digital Research, which I rather liked.
Thank you for the edification.
I worked with a guy named James in FoxPro. He moved to KC.
.
I took Fortran in college and luckily I had just previously purchased one of the
first IBM PCs and a Fortan compiler.
There was no hard drive in this thing, just 2 full height 5 1/4 inch 360K floppies.
So compiling a Fortran program was an exercise in swapping disks -
again and again and again...
I remember a friend had some overclocked 286’s. It made the mouse kind of jumpy and not smooth.
When software was free (wink wink) that 287 really helped my autocad render.
Thank you for the remembrance of Fortran Four and ‘77. Developed a lot of code under VMS/OpenVms in that language. Maybe some of the best in my career. Regards.
Motto: “Searching out fingers across the galaxy!”
I also used DR-DOS for quite a while. Really preferred IBM-DOS, which had REXX in addition to standard DOS batch files. IBM really screwed the pooch by getting in bed with MS for OS/2.
I still have my waften IV fortran textbook.
I used fortran based software and fortran to write tools until my sgi o2 crapped out in 2014. one of the great things about fortran was that you could move subroutines around and change goto logic, recompile and get faster running code. The great thing about the hz100 was that heathkit built it as a kit and you could find ways to improve it in the heathkit magazine. I discovered ramdrive, added more memory and used ramdrive to speed thing up in both compile and execution.
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