At 02:28 AM 5/5/05 -0500, Pat wrote: FWIW Also left out Professional Fortran, IBM Cobal, RM Cobal, Basic Compiler without 8087, Basic Compiler with 8087, APL, Logo and several more. I've been collecting the stuff and I'm amazed how many different languages there were. I'm up to about four LARGE boxs of the stuff. BTW recently picked up an old AT and found an 8" disk drive controller in it. I can't remember who made it (Farmer Electonics?) but it's NOT a compaticard. I powered up the AT to look for any drivers but the CMOS has lost it's settings so I have to dig up a Setup disk and reset them before I can access the HD and look for drivers. Checked my stash and found that all the Setup disks that I have are all for PCs and XTs so I'e got to go dig deeper to find the right Setup disk. Joe

At 08:58 PM 5/6/05 -0500, you wrote: Thanks but I'm sure I have something around here. I just have to get the time to dig it out or download it. FWIW my daughter is graduating from university tomorrow so we're pretty busy at the moment. Joe

On Thu, 05 May 2005 18:45:04 +0200, woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote: IBM C 3.0 came just before OS/2 1.0 as far as I'm able to recall. The first PC C compiler I used was odd - it did not have the standard function library, everything was slightly different. I think that would have been shortly after the XT was launched. -- -bv

On Thu, 5 May 2005, Fred Cisin wrote: I remember using a very much UNIX-like C environment for DOS, called "Manx C". It was small, has the usual "make-cc-as-ld-ar" setup, and produced nice code. What happened to them? This was around ~84 or so.. --f

At 05:56 AM 5/6/2005, Ethan Dicks wrote: Damn. Had a long historical anecdote composed, then Eudora crashed opening a piece of spam and all was lost. Yes, Manx Software's Axtec C was popular on the Amiga. Lattice C had the jump because they were the first officially recommended compiler. They were a bit less agile in the market, so Manx was able to steal away developers. Both compiler's developers would show up at the Amiga developer conferences, eager to show off their latest features. I remember Jim Goodnow of Manx telling me how they started with a PDP-11 cross-compiler to create their CP/M Z-80 (in October 1982) version. Was the Apple II 6502 version out before that? And then they went into the 68000 market with Mac, Atari and Amiga compilers, and they had a PC version of course, too. Inside Amiga itself, they started out with Sun and Stride hosted cross-compilers. The first developer kits included the Lattice PC cross-compiler. I remember editing and compiling on a Compaq luggable, then sending programs over the serial port to my Amiga 1000, which was something like serial number 36. Compiling on early Amigas was a real pain. It was many months before hard disks became available. The RAM disk that could survive a crash and warm reboot was a big help, too. I think Manx closed up in the early to mid 90s. Jim went on to help with REBOL. - John

At 10:25 PM 5/6/2005, Ethan Dicks wrote: I'm not remembering this sort of malloc() bug. Are you thinking of something with the AmigaDOS AllocMem()/FreeMem() calls? Or something in a particular C compiler's library? I can see how a particularly poorly written C application that never checked malloc()'s return value could crash if it wrote to a null pointer. What will be humbling is that when we find the answer, we will find it in an article that I wrote in the 80s. :-) I've been meaning to put all my old Amazing Computing articles online. - John

On Fri, 6 May 2005, Ethan Dicks wrote: I have Manx C for the Apple ][. It was really made to be run from a hard drive. Long ago, I was developing a BBS and needed to convert the message editor that I'd written in BASIC to something much faster. I could've done it in machine language but that would've taken more time than I wanted to spend. I'd known about C and wanted to learn it, and so I thought this might be a good opportunity to do so: a practical project needing a solution. So I went about trying to teach myself C on Manx C. After my first "Hello World!" program took about 3 minutes to compile, involving multiple disk accesses across different volumes, I gave up and just used the Beagle Compiler to compile my BASIC program ;) -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

On Fri, 6 May 2005, John Foust wrote: Yes, sorry. It was Aztec. Very neat little compiler. On more thought, it did NOT have a Make included, I believe I stole the one from Borland, or some PD make. Gawd, I would love a copy of that compiler again, especially if they used the (more or less same) codebase for several backends, most of which I use ;-) --f

Fred N. van Kempen wrote: Probaly not the version you are looking for, but: http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/lang/lang.htm

On Fri, 6 May 2005, Fred N. van Kempen wrote: Slightly OT, my hands-down favorite C compiler to this day is Leor Zolman's BDS C for CP/M-80. The fact it existed at all was wonderful. Its still an amazing piece of software if you ask me, a lot of functionality in a tiny package. No std library but that was easy to write. Flexible, open (you got M80 source to the libs and main() support), friendly (you could call Leor at home), cheap, reliable, made small binaries, true standalone no runtime crapola ala M$ basic compiler. It should be on a short list of historically significant software.

On Thu, 5 May 2005 20:49:36 -0700 (PDT) Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: I have several versions of Aztec C that are from the early 8088 era. A 'light' version and the full-blown product. I believe the manual for my copy is also the manual for the CP/M version. I just have the DOS version. I was poking around coding with it about a year ago on an old DOS laptop. I was trying to get it up and running on my HP-95LX palmtop if I remember correctly (which I have an old version of masm.com on the cmos drive of)

Patrick Finnegan wrote: Oh, another nitmick opportunity. it's a ][, ][+, //e, //c there is no ][e =) -- Tim Riker - http://rikers.org/ - TimR at Debian.org Embedded Linux Technologist BZFlag maintainer - http://BZFlag.org/ - for fun!

The PC/AT does too... It's _very_ useful when you've got a malfunctioning disk controller and want to send bytes to various registers on the card to figure out what the problem is. (If that sounds like the voice of experience, you're right. The 765 o nthe IBM disc controller can be reset in software IIRC, and one of the chips -- either the output port latch or an inverter, I forget -- failed on the card in my XT. Being able to toggle that port bit by hand let me find the problem in a few seconds). -tony

Scott wrote: I don't see why. It's not fundamentally a "Unix game". It originated on TOPS-10 on a DECsystem-10 (PDP-10 processor). The Apple II edition of Microsoft Adventure was the first commercial software I ever purchased, though I'd already almost completed the original version on the DECsystem-10. I thought it was nice being able to run it at home. At the time, the game cost almost two week's take-home pay (part-time fast-food job). Soon followed by Zork II; I'd already played Zork I on a friend's computer. Eric

On Fri, 6 May 2005 19:39:43 -0700 (PDT) "Eric Smith" <eric at brouhaha.com> wrote: You're correct; I was uncertain of the origin of the game. I should have typed <insert whatever bigger system it originated on here> instead of Unix.

On 5/7/05, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: Or "GORILLA" -ethan

On Sat, 7 May 2005, Tony Duell wrote: I have Adventure for a bunch of different platforms: Apple ][, TRS-80, Commodore, PC, etc. I like to brag about my original copy of Zork I on 8" for CP/M ;) I used to love playing that on the APple ][. Definitely was a keyboard and joystick killer. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

On 5/7/05, Vintage Computer Festival <vcf at siconic.com> wrote: Nice. I have an original Personal Software-published disk and manual for the TRS-80. I once saw "Planetfall" on the wall of the local DEC store for RT-11. Never seen any other Infocom games for the PDP-11 anywhere else. -ethan

I remember playing that a LOT on my Model III with my brother. Yes, it did eventually kill several keys. If I remember correctly it was possible to hit your player in the head the both the shot put and discus, to which the game would respond with "I have a headache" or something similar. From memory the original was a self booting disc, though the copy that came with my Model III was modified to run from TRSDOS. I think there was a similar PC version, also a self booting disc. I think I downloaded a disc image

You mean the ancient evil alien responsible for all the ills of mankind, training can protect us? No, wait -- that's Xenu... My bad. -- Tony

Fred Cisin wrote: For what it's worth I own the original Pick PC, on which the three developers that worked for Pick, made the first release. It was on an XT with two half high 10mb drives, and two half high 5 1/4" floppies. It was quite a long time after the PC was out before Pick started to port to it, due to his licencee structure. I also recieved the first copy ever delivered for revenue, s/n 44, which I paid for the first day the announcement came out they would ship the OS. With a friend, John Bohner, we collect all things Pick, so if anyone has any old moldy versions of any version of Pick (Prime recently came up, not a mention that more Pick Prime systems were shipped than Prime OSs), please contact me for proper disposal. Jim

I've always wanted to see what Pick assembly looked like. Is there a reference anywhere? -- ---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Eeny, Meeny, Jelly Beanie, the spirits are about to speak! -- Bullwinkle ---

Sounds deliciously challenging. Gimme. :) (Seriously, yes, I would be interested in some of your examples, mostly just to get a feel for what it could do internally. I had a Pick PC at one stage but it suffered a hard disk crash and we weren't able to recover it, since we were just fooling around with it -- something that came in a lot with other stuff we were playing with. I'd been curious about it ever since.) -- ---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- "The Internet is, once again, your friend" (I wrote this *before* PacBell!)

Have you seen OpenQM? It's a neat GPLed multi-valued system. It's default flavor is UniVerse I think. g. -- "I'm not crazy, I'm plausibly off-nominal!" Proud owner of 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only of its kind.

On Fri, 06 May 2005 03:53:16 +0200, Jay West <jwest at classiccmp.org> wrote: Can anybody tell me anything about the connection between Pick and Revelation? I never saw Pick on a PC, but I have Revelation (for MS-DOS) as well as Advanced Revelation multisuser for both OS/2 and DOS. -- -bv

Jim wrote... And then there's "Advanced Revelation" which was actually quite different inside and out :) To this day I actually still support one Advanced Revelation customer. Revelation, I can believe that. But Advanced Revelation (which I used extensively) seemed to be way too tightly integrated to the PC/DOS environment. I'm assuming it was the older Revelation that they had up on an M1000? I was a Microdata dealer for a while, and I never ran into Revelation there. Nifty, I have learned something :) It was also quite prevalent in Health Care, video rental, and hardware stores. Last I half-way followed the old MV markets, IBM was actually continuing to enhance uniVerse, which suprised me. I figured they bought it to kill it. But I haven't heard of any major updates in the past few years (not that I still follow it really). Yes, I remember talking to you on the phone. I didn't recall past knowledge of you specifically, but I definitely noticed we knew all the same people it sounded like :) What vendors and subsystems did you work on? I spent time in GA's overflow management routines as well as some monitor work, a few years prior to Ian's reign (Mike Bender I believe I recall?). Also did a stint at MDCS working on the tapeio modes for sequel. Then MDCS tapped me to implement Forth on the MDCS platforms so they could migrate some healthcare product - I forget the particulars - but I turned down the job. Many times I wish I hadn't, that would have been fun. Sad, but true. Pick was really an incredible database, unfortunately they added OS cruft to it in the beginning. By the time they stripped out the OS stuff and made it run as a layer on unix & DOS/WIN, it was just too late. Normally, accessing a real database inside of BASIC is rather a pain, and you spend a lot of time thinking about other things than the application problem at hand. With Pick, touching the database was so intuitive... like programming with fine thin leather gloves on instead of mittens. The only thing I wished they did different was tie the dictionary straight into basic, as opposed to referencing via separate variables and the like. Yes, you could program around this, but... twas the only shortcoming. I know exactly how you feel. Jay West

On Thu, 5 May 2005, Tony Eros wrote: You're not supposed to know that until at least level 15 (and a quarter million dollars later). The next knock on your door will be the Scientology storm troopers. Resistance is futile. P.S. No apologies to any followers of El Ron Hubbardism. Thrrt. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]