Starwatcher2001

9 ms·

31.
by Starwatcher2001 4y ago
I came across a council system for recording the holes that ultility companies dig in roads. Often a specific job would require several additional "associated" holes to be dug around the main one. The programmer chose the filename
32.
by Starwatcher2001 4y ago
I did a lot of that on my CPC464 and TRS-80 too. Thanks for rekindling the memory. Relative jumps were the easiest way to make code relocatable, but you were limited to +/- 128 for an offset. I used the "Programming the Z-80"
33.
by Starwatcher2001 4y ago
I'm an ex-demonite too. Had all the telehone numbers of the local pops (point of presence) in a file to copy to the moden after the ADT command. As the pops were heavily subscribed and would often just give engaged tones, I used to use
34.
by Starwatcher2001 4y ago
Many moons ago I came across an anti-theft device for a car that was designed on similar lines. The idea was that car alarms are easily defeated and are generally ignored anyway if they go off. When armed, the circuit would cause the car to
35.
by Starwatcher2001 4y ago
Good old laplink. I've still got a "hydra" cable in my desk drawer. Back in the 90s I used the parallel port to interface a PC to a TRS-80 to allow me to store games on the PC. As another commenter has mentioned, the parallel
36.
by Starwatcher2001 5y ago
I'm 61 and average 211. I don't think my reaction time is bad, but my memory isn't as good as it once was.
37.
by Starwatcher2001 5y ago
I've tried probably a dozen over the years and settled on this one about a decade ago: https://www.hibermate.com/ I've had three in that time due to accidentally leaving it in hotel rooms. A test of a good mask is
38.
by Starwatcher2001 5y ago
I bought a TRS-80 in 1979 and still have it (and a couple more). I cut my programming teeth on it, learning BASIC, then assembler and even a little hardware hacking. I dislike the "trash" term as for me it revolutionised my life,
39.
by Starwatcher2001 5y ago
Pretty sure it's not in the original TRS-80 model 1 Level II ROM. (Also a Microsoft version). I disassembled it to see what unused key words it had, then revectored some of the disk related commands to my own code. (Before I got a flop
40.
by Starwatcher2001 5y ago
The original IBM PC (8086) had the letters IBM coded into a specific part of the ROM. When PC clones started being made, IBM (and probably other software companies) would look for those letters to verify the software was running on a genuin
41.
by Starwatcher2001 5y ago
We had a hot water bottle burst this week. My wife woke up to soggy feet and the water had penetrated right through the mattress. The bottle was empty and probably slowly leaking all night. It took much of the day to dry the mattress out. O
42.
by Starwatcher2001 5y ago
I've been a developer for 40+ years and can really relate to this sub-thread. Now I'm spending time with my grand-children do I realise how much time I missed when my own children were growing up. Working those hours, building tho
43.
by Starwatcher2001 5y ago
"Unless you are a diver please don't comment with this type of snark - seriously." PADI Advanced, deep, nitrox, 100+ dives mostly in the cold waters of the North Sea. Edited: added context
44.
by Starwatcher2001 5y ago
If you really have only a vague recollection of basic safety checks you shouldn't be diving - seriously.
45.
by Starwatcher2001 6y ago
"Seeing" is actually about how steady the atmosphere is. The old sodium lights emit in a narrow part of the spectrum which can be mitigated against by using light pollution filters. These allow all light through, except sodium fre
46.
by Starwatcher2001 6y ago
I had a colonoscopy five years ago here in the UK without any anesthesia and it was perfectly fine. Walked into the theatre wearing a gown and a pair of shorts with a flap at the back, and hopped up onto the bed. Somewhat embarrassing with
47.
by Starwatcher2001 6y ago
I'm 60 next month, and have been programming for 40 years (everything from Basic, Cobol... to C#). I'm currently having a blast learning Java and Android programming.
48.
by Starwatcher2001 6y ago
If this subject interests you, I'd highly recommend the book "Sunfall" by Jim Al-Khalili. It's the physicist's first venture into fiction and is based around the threat of coronal mass ejections and a flipping of th
49.
by Starwatcher2001 6y ago
Hey, I used one of those in an accountants in the early 80's, with the same weird orange and black screen. I recall there being no "enter" key, but several keys marked OCK1, OCK2.. etc (Operators Control Key). That was a good
50.
by Starwatcher2001 6y ago
I ran accounts on an Apricot for a year or so. It was actually an improvement over the PC, using software fonts etc, and the spanking new 3.5" diskettes. I don't think it was 100% compatible and sadly didn't do particularly w
51.
by Starwatcher2001 6y ago
In 1985, I was developing a simple serial network for barcode readers, to run on the original IBM PC. It needed to run as a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) assembler routine and use the 8250 UART chip, and the 8259 Programmable Interupt C
52.
by Starwatcher2001 6y ago
There was a bug in the TRS-80 basic (which was indeed Microsoft). It had an "on x goto" command that allowed the program to move to different lines depending on the value of a variable: ON X GOTO 200,300,400,500 depending if x=1
53.
by Starwatcher2001 6y ago
The old TRS-80 Model 1, Level 1 had 4KB of memory and the only permitted variables were integers (A-Z), and two strings A$ and B$. No decimals, floats etc. Level 2 allowed any number of letters in a variable name... but only the first two w
54.
by Starwatcher2001 6y ago
Very sad day. Autobahn, Man Machine and Computer World were my constant background music when I was learning to program on a TRS-80 all those years back. "I program my home computer... beam myself into the future..." Still program
55.
by Starwatcher2001 7y ago
I like nulls too and think they make perfect sense, especially with numeric fields. Suppose we have an "age" field, but don't actually know the age of the person, null makes perfect sense. Otherwise we'd have do do somet
56.
by Starwatcher2001 7y ago
That was the port that switched the screen from 64 columns to 32. A different bit in the port also controlled a physical relay that was used to switch the cassette tape recorder on and off. Toggling the pair together quickly did indeed look
57.
by Starwatcher2001 7y ago
I did pretty much the same, although I managed to get the 16k RAM version. I've still got my old TRS-80 in the loft, eventually with the expansion box and couple of disk drives. Each single-sided 5.25" floppy held a massive 90k, t
58.
by Starwatcher2001 7y ago
Back in the day there were a suprising number of good technical books to learn from. I kicked off with two books from Tandy (Radio Shack): [0] The TRS80 Technical Reference Manual (1978). This had the full schematics of the computer, explan
59.
by Starwatcher2001 7y ago
Back in the 80s I had a TRS80 with 5 inch floppy drive, and an Amstrad CPC464 with built in cassette tape. Having no patience to wait for games to load, I linked the two together via the parallel printer interfaces and wrote some Z80 code o
60.
by Starwatcher2001 7y ago
Not an easter egg as such, but I came across a BASIC program for the TRS-80 in the early 80's where the programmer had worked out that program lines of various lengths would produce interference of different frequencies when a radio wa

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