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[Dave]

LOL

That dates you some what! :-)

What I knew about DOS all those years ago, I may have forgotten quite a bit about it, by now. Still the best operating system I ever used. Though, perhaps CP/M might have had the edge over it. I'll never know now.

Dave

[Stefek Zaba]

Careful - that way religious wars start. Soon I'll be waxing soppy over RSX-11M, early VMS, and good ol' TOPS-10. Then a Multics bigot will emerge from the woodwork ;-)

[Bob Eager]

Dunno about that, but I used all of the abive before I got to DOS! And UNIX in 1976...

[Colin Wilson]

Back when I was in school, an RML380Z running CP/M was the Cray of its day (as far as our school was concerned at least...) - and I did a program in Basic that found a flaw in the file handling. It was quite a simple program that opened and closed a couple of data files several times, and it would crash the machine without fail with file errors.

The same program, ported line by line to BBC Basic ran perfectly - I was quite proud of the port as well, considering i`d never used BBC Basic and my file accesses were via a new and exciting medium i`d never used before

- a floppy disk - and the code was converted without having actually seen the machine in the flesh ! (figured it out by reading the manual)

Those were the days - I managed to save enough to buy an Acorn Electron, and managed to write myself a 25 room adventure game with basic N/S/E/W navigation the first day, as well as a room that required an action to get past :-) (sure, trying improve the parsing of commands and new words took considerably longer, but it did the job !)

[Nick Atty]

Was that using the clever little box that controlled two cassette decks to give you (mind-bogglingly slow) read and write file access and copying?

I remember hacking the basic on that one - doing useful things like single key keyboard reading (using the appropriate CP/M interrupt) and more silly things (like changing 'I' into the break character or redefining all the error messages - then leaving it for the next poor sap (or, ideally, the computer studies teacher)).

Watching someone typing and getting PRI

*break* was always entertaining. As was changing the syntax error message (having shortened all the others to make space in the table) to "^LYou got it wrong again you silly great &*%(*%"

ObPuzzle - how old are Colin and I - cos we must be pretty close to each other.

[Colin Wilson]

You know what, I really can`t remember whether the RML was tape or disk, but from what I remember the first floppy machine I used was the BBC...

LOL I think I was 12 or 13 at the time, so I wasn`t that good at coding - although, sad to admit, the first book I ever bought for myself was "How To Program The Z80" by Rodnay Zaks

I`m 35 now, and still crap at coding :-}

The built in assembler on the Electron was as close as I got to real machine code, although I did dabble with POKEing code using READ / DATA on the Spectrum - I semi-successfully found a way in to the ROM on the Spectrum to allow me to read copy protected games... I gave up the hard stuff and went back to using variants of Basic, and have quite a few add- on programs still available on Aminet for a BBS system I used to run :-}

[raden]

In message , Bob Eager writes

Johnny come latelys

I have a couple of Superbrains c/w original OS

They just don't make them like that anymore

[Dave]

The easy way was to create a soft ROM. It was a plug in memory that with the flick of a switch would take over the Spectrum's ROM and substitute the R/W memory on the plug in soft ROM. All that had to be done now, was to load in your own software and you could hack any game. It took advantage of the NMI routine that was corrupted in the Spectrum.

Dave

[Bob Eager]

Played with them too....

(small child sees computer keyboard: "Look, daddy, red buttons!"; presses them both....together...)

Not to mention the ZX80....and the first UNIX in England....!

So there! ;-)