|
Post by Carl Gundel on Apr 5, 2018 11:48:54 GMT -5
In 1969, my boss said "we are getting a computer for this hospital lab, and you plus 3 others are going to school in NYC to learn how to program this IBM1800 process controller." And so we did, each of us assigned to particular tasks that seemed appropriate for our talents. I was assigned the task of figuring out how to connect the lab instruments to the computer, extract the signals from the instruments, process the signals into useable data, and print out the results on 5 printers (IBM golf balls) in the labs. I was also to pass the results to disk files so that another programmer could create charts for each patient that could be printed out on a line printer (1443 if i remember) and distributed to the proper floors in the hospital. I had to learn assembly language for the computer in the NYC school, create interfaces with the instruments, some control boxes for each instrument to start, stop and other monitoring by the computer to collect analog and digital data. Programming was Fortran and assembler for my part on punched cards, computer had a whopping 48k of memory and the 3 disk drives were about 100k total (it was afterall 1969). We did get it to work by early 70's, the first ones in our city to do so. We then expanded to doctor offices and did outpatient testing and reporting to the doctors offices via printed reports sorted by doctor and address. That was the first system, but not the last...there were other computers IBM System 7, IBM SERIES1 , DEC boxes, and of course other languages , mostly native assembler for my part, 10 different systems ,9 were written by us. I learned of Liberty Basic and I used it to process data from the main computers by FTPing the data i wanted to my desktop and analyzing the data using Liberty Basic and sending the diata over our network back to various lab printers. I also created bar code labels for various lab instruments in Chemistry, Hematology, Blood Bank, Specimen Processing, and Pathology, using Liberty Basic. I finally retired in 2015 after passing the baton to a coworker who also has a Liberty Basic license , after I showed him how to create programs for all the functions that I had done. Excellent! 48K back in 1969. Wow that must have been considered a LOT of memory back then.
|
|
GWS
New Member
Posts: 18
|
Post by GWS on Apr 7, 2018 15:00:19 GMT -5
Some 60 years ago, as a 20-year-old, I walked into a large building in the UK Midlands, who were running aptitude tests for computer programmers – ‘I wasn’t suitable’, they said. So I took a course in Computing for Engineers (Fortran), and I’ve been writing all sorts of programs for the 60 years since. At the time, only Accounting departments could afford the millions of pounds needed to build a computing centre, but as a young Electrical engineer, they did allow us to have one run each night – punched cards and all .. The accountants were very worried by our programs. When their programs ran, tape drives were spinning, and line printers were churning out paper. An engineering program would read a few punched cards – and the whole machine would apparently stop, until eventually a few sheets of paper would emerge. They were worried the machine had gone wrong .. There were very few folk in those years who knew how to program a computer, and my FORTRAN course acted as a magic carpet, which over about 5 years, took me from being a junior engineer to Senior Engineer (Computing and Technical) in charge of the engineering computing department for the South Eastern Area. I was by then a C.Eng MIEE In 1970, I joined the Railway Technical Centre in Derby as Planning Group leader, dealing with train performance, investment, and socioeconomic data analysis. Lots of FORTRAN programs here – with a fancy title of Senior Principal Scientific Officer. The IBM Personal Computer arrived about now, and I discovered Basic – GOTO’s and all. Much better than FORTRAN. But Mrs Thatcher’s Tories eventually caught up with British Railways – and closed the whole Research Centre down just before privatization. I transferred to a local University computing department, helping students and staff to use these newfangled PC’s.. I converted BBC Basic programs to QBasic and developed a VB5 program for business training. (I actually got paid good money for that). I retired at 60 in 1997 and entered old age – no fun at all. Hobbies were Amateur radio and programming. I discovered IBasic, PureBasic and Liberty Basic in the early 2000’s and tended to use IBasic for most of my programs since then. A bit jaded and missing my old spark of enthusiasm, I’ve recently re-discovered LB – so I’m looking into doing a bit more programming on my Windows 7 machine while my health holds up .. Best wishes, Graham
|
|
|
Post by Rod on Apr 7, 2018 17:04:12 GMT -5
I am sure you have a good few years programming in you yet, please share, that was a fascinating testimonial.
|
|
|
Post by marcleon on Apr 18, 2018 0:22:57 GMT -5
1977 bought a TRS80 and learned some basic and Z80 assembler 1980 worked for Radio Shack as a CMR for some time 1987 moved to other country worked in a private computer shop and then as a CAD instructor learned using some other languages on the way ( Forth, Snobol .... ) somewhere in the mid 90thies made a phone call to a certain Carl Gundel asking him why my program disk didn't arrive Had some interesting interchanges with Alyce Watson, Brosco ,Tom Record .... about midi, graphics ..... (anybody remembers writing DLL in Oberon ? ) 2004 - 2008 used liberty basic mostly for personal database and financial market analisis programming then some health problems apparted me from computing now using 4.01 on emulated win XP ( linux ) for calculations, home management and fun
|
|
|
Post by Alyce Watson on Apr 18, 2018 4:21:22 GMT -5
1977 bought a TRS80 and learned some basic and Z80 assembler Had some interesting interchanges with Alyce Watson, Brosco ,Tom Record .... about midi, graphics ..... (anybody remembers writing DLL in Oberon ? ) Marc, it is wonderful to see you here! -Alyce
|
|
|
Post by Carl Gundel on Apr 18, 2018 8:32:54 GMT -5
then some health problems apparted me from computing now using 4.01 on emulated win XP ( linux ) for calculations, home management and fun Hey Marc! Sorry to hear about the health problems. You should grab a copy of LB v4.5.1. Your existing registration will work with it. www.libertybasic.com/download.html
|
|
|
Post by bluatigro on Apr 20, 2018 5:33:33 GMT -5
i first encountered programming on midlevel technik scool [1983] i studied metal engineriring [ no diploma ] in that time computer's had 2 color's the screen was 80*25 char's you could change the shape of a 8*8 pixel char you had floppy's whit 360Kb they costed +- 11euro / 10 pices next i did secondary level in 1995 ... 1997 i had first a c128 on a c128 you can control 2 sceen's 1 for text on a monitor and 1 for graphics on tv 16 color's i build my first AI program's on that next i had a amiga500 i added a 500Kb memory and a HD 50Mb this had ham mode whit 4096 color's you can input a tv signal into a amiga i build my frist animation's on that next i had several pc's | laptop's i m from +-2010 member of the board of HCC.basic and HCC.ai in +-2010 HCC.basic merged whit HCC.C and HCC.pascal into HCC.programmeren i added c++ and python to my skilset the HCC is the biggest computer club in europe HCC : www.hcc.nl [dutch] HCC.programmeren : www.programmeren.hcc.nl [dutch] HCC.ai : www.ai.hcc.nl [dutch] i m know there as titus my speciality's are : graphics and AI [ see YouTube : titus krijgsman ] i m also interested in robotic's i have some fischertechnik and a lego ev3 mindstorms i don't have a job in programming : i have a diagnose that is preventing that and i don't have a diploma in programming [/p]
|
|
|
Post by donnybowers on May 7, 2018 6:23:57 GMT -5
My first computer was a Commodore 128 that someone gave me back in 1990. It came with a floppy drive and two disks. One had some utilities on it and the other had a word processor. But, if I booted it up without the disk it had it's own BASIC language built in. So I started playing around with that and I really enjoyed it. Later I bought a used 8088 DOS computer and started using GWBASIC and BASICA. Then I found a copy of Turbo Basic at a garage sale and I loved it. I ended up writing a program for statistical process control that I used in my work as a CNC operator/programmer. It was actually doing CNC work that got me interested in computers in the first place. When I left that company they actually paid me to make my program more user friendly so they could continue to use it for quality control in my department.
I continued to use Turbo Basic all the way up to when I got my first Windows XP computer. One day I discovered freeware and started searching around for a freeware BASIC program and I stumbled upon Just BASIC. I liked it right away and pretty much retired my Turbo Basic, though I still have it in case I ever feel a need to use it for something. I think it took me a year or two before I finally purchased a copy of LB Pro 4.04. I learned through the help files and surfing the old Conforums LB forum for answers to anything I couldn't figure out with the help files.
I do a lot of personal research and some writing, so a lot of the programs I make with LB have to do with creating programs that I can use to organize and categorize the various things I research and write about and then have the ability to turn my writing into a website. I also wrote a program starting around 2005 that parsed through a text file of the Bible with Strong's numbers and creating a Bible website where you can click on words and get the strong's definition and a concordance of all the occurances of that Greek or Hebrew word. More recently I wrote some programs to make html pages with links to old TV programs on Youtube and DailyMotion. My wife likes those old shows and you can't find some of them on Netflix or Hulu. Then in the last couple of months I started selling stuff on Ebay and I wrote a program that helps me calculate what I need to charge for an item and (hopefully) not lose money on it. Then I found that I was doing a lot of web searches researching the value of some of the items I was listing and ended up writing a program that can open searches on several web pages at once, with one search. I have several versions of that for different kinds of searches that I do. All in all, I probably have written hundreds of programs over the years, some are just little programs that do some calculations. Others are fairly sophisticated. I don't play around with graphics that much, but I did write a program that reads a .csv file created by a cheap voltage data logger I bought and renders them to a line graph. The software that came with the data logger sucked at giving me a good overview of the data, so I made my own program for that. Eventually I'm thinking of getting an Arduino and making my own data loggers.
The thing I like most about Liberty BASIC is ease of use. The learning curve seems to be a lot shorter (for me anyway) than some of the other languages I've tried to learn. I played around with C++ for awhile, but felt like I was getting nowhere. I like Liberty BASIC and I haven't found a better BASIC language; and I've tried. A lot. I'm really looking forward to the release of the Linux version. LB works fine in Wine, but I'm looking forward to being able to create native Linux programs. I have a few tools I've written that I would like to one day release to the open source community. I would love to see a serious LB open source community sprout up one day. I think that would really be cool.
|
|
|
Post by donnybowers on May 10, 2018 0:40:28 GMT -5
I'm also doing some research using small solar panel and alternative battery applications. I've written quite a few programs that help me calculate approximate efficiencies and capabilities of my small solar power applications. Most of these are specifically targeted to my personal needs at my latitude and longitude in Michigan. I believe this research (and the programs I'm writing for it) will help me when I begin to move toward setting up a larger solar power system in my home.
|
|
|
Post by Carl Gundel on May 10, 2018 12:48:02 GMT -5
My first computer was a Commodore 128 that someone gave me back in 1990. It came with a floppy drive and two disks. One had some utilities on it and the other had a word processor. But, if I booted it up without the disk it had it's own BASIC language built in. So I started playing around with that and I really enjoyed it. Later I bought a used 8088 DOS computer and started using GWBASIC and BASICA. Then I found a copy of Turbo Basic at a garage sale and I loved it. I ended up writing a program for statistical process control that I used in my work as a CNC operator/programmer. It was actually doing CNC work that got me interested in computers in the first place. When I left that company they actually paid me to make my program more user friendly so they could continue to use it for quality control in my department. I also wrote some software for CNC programming in BASIC at the circuitboard factory where I worked years ago. First on an old KayPro computer running CP/M and MS-BASIC. This was a specialized CNC text editor, and a simulator for the Excellon drilling/routing tables. The low resolution graphics were more than good enough to prevent many bad programs from going out to the shop floor, saving a lot of money. Later I wrote a file server for the Excellon machines in Power BASIC, which is what Turbo BASIC ultimately became. Great product. Also, as I mentioned before, I wrote a special graphical program for creating electrical test fixtures for circuitboards, in Liberty BASIC.
|
|
|
Post by laboyd2 on May 13, 2018 13:28:06 GMT -5
Hi! I'm Larry Boyd. The first computer I programmed was a vacuum tube Bendix G15, costing about $1,000,000, Although physically larger, it was slower and had less memory the Commadore 64 I would later acquire.
This was in the spring of 1959, my freshman year at Michigan Tech. It was their first digital computer, having used analog computers for several years. It was bought by one of the departments for their own use, but they decided to offer a course in programming, Math 410. That was a senior level course, but the first year, they let any one take it for an extra 1 credit. We did not even have an assembler, writing everything in absolute hexadecimal, fed in via punched paper tape.
I was the first student to use a digital computer computer for some of my upper class courses. If I got there before they left for lunch, I could use it until they came back an hour later. Some days I would get it hung up, unable to recover before they returned.
After graduation as a Mechanical Engineer, I went to the University of Michigan for grad school. I arrived in the fall of 1962, just as they were swapping out the vacuum tube IBM 709 for the transistor IBM 7090. This was for general use by student and facility. I spent 2 years as a part time research assistant, helping develop programs written in MAD, while pursuing a Masters also in Mechanical Engineering.
After school, I was part of Comshare, a computer timesharing company using the SDS 940, developed at the University of California at Berkeley.
My first assignment was to write a BASIC compiler compatible with the the version in use at Dartmouth. As a fresh young kid, I didn't know how you were supposed to write compilers. I proceed to create a compact, one pass BASIC compiler which would run all the games people downloaded from Dartmouth.
Over the years, at several companies, I introduced engineers to using computers to supplement their slide rules and HP calculators, as well as introducing them to Computer Assisted Drafting. I have programmed some 20 different CPU's. Invariably including assembly language for most, as well as probably some 2 dozen higher level languages.
On my home PC I wanted to write some programs for my own use and decided to try BASIC on windows. I tried several different flavors until one day running across Liberty BASIC. I down loaded a trial copy. I soon sent in my money and never looked back.
My thanks to Carl for providing a compiler for a much more complex version of BASIC than I dealt with many years ago. A special thanks for dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the various versions of Windows !!!
|
|
Kuron
New Member
Posts: 20
|
Post by Kuron on May 14, 2018 8:29:40 GMT -5
I was born in '69. I lived with my grandparents from ages 4-8. My grandfather worked for the Defense Mapmaking Agency. When I was 6-8, during the Summer, I would often go to work with him. At his office, they used Xerox Altos. Besides having networked multiplayer "Trek" and "3D Maze" games to play, one of the guys there spent a lot of time introducing me to BCPL and teaching me the basics of programming. I was hooked.
I had access to an Apple II in 1979 and in 1980, I was online via CompuServe. Over the following years, I used Atari, Commodore and TI-99/4A computers. I still have my TI-99/4A computers. Yes, plural. I have a stainless steel one and a beige which they were literally giving out for free near the end of their run. Montgomery Wards had them on clearance for $50 and TI still had a $50 rebate program.
I graduated high school two years early, in 1985 at age 16, and got a full-time job. With my first paycheck, I bought a Color Computer 2 from Radio Shack. I can remember paying around $250 to buy a chip to upgrade it to Extended BASIC, and around $250 to upgrade it from 16K to 64K of memory. One of the upgrades required you to solder the chip in place. The CoCo 2 was not as good as the TI-99/4A, but I mainly bought it because they had a cool pinball builder game cartridge as well as a spectrum analyzer cartridge which was very useful for my music.
When I was 17, I got a job doing database programming for a major insurance company. Yes, a white-collar suit and tie job at age 17.
I have held a variety of programming jobs over the years, many in the gaming field. I also taught programming in an after-school program for kids for many years.
I quit programming for a living around 2005 and went back to working full-time in the music field. Most of my programming since 2006, has been for homebrew gaming systems like my HYDRA, Meggy Jr. RGB and Fuzebox. I particularly love the HYDRA. It has a Propeller CPU at 160 MIPS, (80 MHz, 20 MIPS per cog) 8 PIC-like CPU cores each with 496 32bit-words of workspace plus a shared 32kB RAM and 32kB ROM and 128kB serial EEPROM. It really is like the old days of programming and there is very little memory, in which everything must fit, including drivers for video, input, etc.
Unfortunately, I suffered a TBI in 2014 and I have had to relearn a lot of things. Programming is one of those things proving to be extremely difficult and frustrating for me to relearn, to the point where I am close to giving up.
When it first popped up on CompuServe's SWREG service. Although I have not yet bought any of the 4.X releases, I have been with LB since it was first released and came with a printed manual and support was provided via Carl's BBS.
There was NOTHING like LB when it came out, and the only other indie programming language of any worth was Euphoria, but is was only for DOS back then.
I used to love to write games, mainly very retro (think Atari 2600 style). But, post TBI, 3D and most 2D games are out as they make my head hurt because of the movement.
If I can ever get a grasp on programming again, I want to write some utilities to help with my work in my music studio (once I can get my new studio built).
It has survived, it has never suffered from feature-creep, it is very stable and it has an author that cares about it.
|
|
|
Post by melkior on May 22, 2018 1:44:33 GMT -5
Hi folks. I used to be Oldiecoder and Waybackman (after the first user name somehow got borked) on the old forum, but I'm using one of my more common pseudonyms here.
I think I first got my start in computers by a combination of two things. Firstly, when Tandy / Radio Shack were still around they used to sell logic and computer chips in blister packs off-the-shelf. It was in one of those that I discovered an 8080 CPU, complete with the machine code and operating specifications in a bulky data sheet (more like a booklet) stapled to the back of the pack. After buying it and reading the data sheet, I realised that it needed a clock driver IC and a bus driver IC, which were also available through Radio Shack, as was the timing crystal and capacitors and other miscellaneous components required.
I ended up building a simple "computer" using two 2114 RAM chips which are each 1K by 4 bits. I simply paralleled the address lines so I had 1K by 8 bits.
My first experience with BASIC was with the display computers in various stores. My biggest experience was probably with the TRS-80 Model 1 with "Level 1 Basic" because a particular Tandy shop allowed me to sit and play on the computer near the front window because I was a good advertisement for the shop and for the computer.
I'll condense this by skipping several other stages in my totally informal computer education, except to mention that I had a long and happy relationship with IBM compatible computers and GW-BASIC.
I can't remember how I found Liberty Basic, but I can remember how happy I was that BASIC hadn't been abandoned. I was even happier when I realised both just how advanced LB is, since anything which can't be performed directly by a LB command can be simulated somehow, often by a DLL call, and that LB is based on "ye olde" GW-BASIC which made my transition to LB very fast and very easy.
If I had one complaint about Liberty Basic, it would be the variable length of numeric variables in LB. This makes it impossible for me to use what was a very useful short-cut in GW-BASIC.
A while back, I transferred a program by Paul Alger called Galactic Conflict to GW-BASIC from its original TRS-80 CoCo BASIC. That game featured different "levels" of space, each recorded in a separate file, and transferring from one level to another required the saving of the current level to its file and the loading of the other level from its file. It was a way of simulating 3D space while actually using two dimensions, to save memory space.
The original game used a sequential data file, which made saving and loading very slow. I sped up the whole thing to eye-blink speed by using GW-BASIC's BSAVE and BLOAD commands (binary save and binary load). The commands need to know how much data to save and load, so I used an integer array to hold the level data (2 bytes per array element) and the Varptr(array(0,0)) command (variable pointer) to find the start of the array. From there, it was a simple matter of multiplying the length by the width (adding one to each number to account for the zero element) and multiplying by two to get the length. I could "flash" save the whole array over the top of its file in one fast operation and "flash" load the data for the target level over the top of the array data already in memory.
So if I could choose just one thing I'd like added to LB, it would be the option to use GW-BASIC compatible numeric variables: integer, single-precision and double-precision.
For all that, LB is still the fastest way for me to prototype a program idea, and is often the simplest solution when fast computing speed is not required.
My most complicated LB program has to be a game of 6-spot Dominoes, played against the computer. For all it has a simple strategy (play the first playable piece it finds), it still manages to win about 2 out of every 5 games against a good player.
My most-used LB program is definitely a utility I wrote for an on-line game program. It's been running automatically once per day for a couple of years at least. It uses a work-around to add a function which isn't supported by the multi-player version of the game.
|
|
|
Post by donnybowers on Jul 3, 2018 2:40:14 GMT -5
I wrote a graphical simulator once for checking G Code using Turbo Basic. It was for some old CNC lathes. It may well have saved me a few crashes, though I was pretty good at catching them during my dry runs anyway.
Luckily I didn't have to use any special text editor because I was able to feed the programs in from ASCII text. The ASCII text was used to make punch tapes that were used to feed the program into the CNC. My program just interpreted the G Code and then plotted the tool paths on the screen.
I initially intended to implement it for my entire lathe department, but I never found the time to put all of the G Codes that we didn't use that often into it and make it more user friendly. I doubt I still have a copy of that. If I do, it's probably on an old floppy disk. By now the data would probably be degraded anyway. I had dreams at the time of writing my own graphical interface to actually write the G Code. I think I had made a rough start at it, but again, never found the time to finish it. At that time my SPC program took priority because of some special problems we had in one of our most profitable products. Using that special SPC program I was able to take that product from an extremely high rejection rate to almost zero rejections in about 6 months time.
|
|
|
Post by malewin on Nov 12, 2018 18:26:25 GMT -5
My first encounter with BASIC was after I heard of the machine learning program at ax dynamics - Anegis Consulting. It got me extremely interested in IT, Internet of Things, programming. And here I am, sitting on these boards.
|
|