Hi Steve
I agree with the statements you have made, I wonder how many of the people involved in the project you are working on have considered the initial brief for the project requirements. I would guess that most are relatively young compared to us and they have there relevant qualifications in either computer sciences or an associated degree. I would also guess that there are very few who understand machine code or the concept of bcd (singular byte encoding) on a given structure.
It is a shame that most modern computer courses teach high level languages like C## or Visual basic and skip over there fundamental beginnings of the old days of programming and the structure of basic machine code.
" Tandy Radio Shack" (TRS 80) brings back some cool memories, the old TRS series for it's time was really cool, the Sinclair Spectrum ZX80 still gave better performance though, programming was a real pain, there were so many bugs in the system like the TRS 80 that any undefined variable would cause a total system crash. I have to say my fondest memories were of the old Commodore Pet computer, it had the old monochromatic green screen, the slowest floppy drive in the world but it was a really solid computer. The best computer for it's time was the old BBC Basic, (64k of memory and a very early RISC OS), I'm showing my age here (please don't tell).
The point I am trying to make (and echo Steve's sentiments) is that there is a large majority of people who profess to be experts in given fields, who write software or create products based on other peoples technology without having the understanding of the basic principals of the building blocks of that technology that they are trying to sell. The problem for the future that may occur, are what happens when the older technical artisans who have learned the basic principals are no longer available to impart the relevant information to solve the current problems. If the current generation think they can plague-rise then technological advances will cease because the current generation will be unable to think outside of their teaching confines.
All the best
Clive
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It is now time to state Robertses law of modern computer operating systems
"As motherboard speed, memory, and hard drive capacity climb, operating system programmers will use the resources in such a bloated way, that soon boot time will go from 15 seconds or so to approaching infinity, the machine will never be able to fully boot through the bloated operating system, let alone run a benchmark or give you a prompt."
We have two skilled programmers trying to learn how to read a variable length file format from a doppler velocimeter here at work, its goonna take them weeks in java and windows "C sharp dot net" whatever. I'm getting so POed waiting for it,That I'm about to do it in Quickbasic in a evening just because I can and I'm the hardware guy, not the code guy.
I had a model I 16K TRS80 with a tape drive, Dad wouldnt pay 700$ for the expansion interface and another 500$ for a floppy.Buffo, I have seen and used EIs, and seen the schematics, so I know they existed. Remember the "one liners" contests in the TRS80 magazines? How much code could you fit in one line to do something useful. Remember , hitting carrage return to add a line to a program could burn as much as 200 bytes of ram.
I too, missed getting a big trak. fnny how there is not a toy rob0t out there now with anywhere near the functionality of that beast for the price, even adjusted for todays dollars.
BTW, one of the first laser graphics generators had 128 pairs of linear pots, scanned in sequence.Try drawing with that!.. then record it to FM tape. Its successor was boosted to 256 pairs. Suprisingly, some of the pictures of the images were pretty good by todays standards.
Steve Roberts
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Originally Posted by Pangolin
