drreed
April 12th, 2010, 08:53 PM
A few things I found:
IBM System 370 Assembly Language Programming Manual
Several books on DOS, hard bound, including such things as "Breaking the 640K memory barrier - extending RAM" and an "Undocumented DOS" book, my intro to hacking!
How about PC Techniques? I have several copies, covering such topics as building graphics libraries, B-Tree libraries, etc. When I told my son we used to hand code our "windows" and GUI apps, I don't think he understood, I have several code print-outs (on green-bar and 9pin dot matrix) to show him.
About a years worth of Programmers Journalm lots of articles about OOP.
Remember Byte magazine? How about the Byte Network BBS? I found the user manual (downloaded and printed out on a dot-matrix) for my Wildcat BBS I used to run at home.
DBASE III manual (plus the disks on 5 1/4" floppy). Turbo Pascal, and Windows 3.1.
A box full of assorted serial cable parts for making null-modems, RS232 TTY cables, Printer cables, etc. (Before there were local stores that sold them, we bought components through the mail and built our own)
A box of electronics plans and assorted parts, including my design of a laser beam communicator, that used a beam (from an early grocery store scanner) and a parabolic reflector to to communicate over a mile away. I never got it working actually, but thats the tech they use to bounce light off glass and pick up room vibrations, eavesdropping on the occupants - I think you can buy them in spy stores now)
All of the receipts from my first IBM "compatible", a smokin' 286-12mhz w/ 1 mb ram, (thats 36 DIP's kids, 8 + a parity in each bank) 60mb RLL drive, and a hercules graphics card. Also found the receipt where I upgraded to EGA for $160. (Recall I'd already studied up on extending ram!)
This was right after Intel released the details of their processor and manufacturers could finally compete with IBM. Before that, Compaq tried, and I can remember demoing them in the store, and they always locked up after a few minutes of running time. About all you could do was stare at the curser, if you tried to do anything, it locked up!
I also found all of my grad school notebooks. Every program I wrote had similar teacher comments " - 2 points, Need to document this ---> " LOL
Yep, that's why I liked UNIX so much. That Unisys 5000 (NCR Tower) w/ 32mb RAM just hummed along. If I broke something, a call to Unisys tech support was always answered by somebody who actually knew what they were doing. They would step me through compiling kernels, repairing file systems, and reading core dumps. MS was a joke in comparison, a toy, something to experiment with for those of us that didn't have $70K to drop on a real computer.
IBM System 370 Assembly Language Programming Manual
Several books on DOS, hard bound, including such things as "Breaking the 640K memory barrier - extending RAM" and an "Undocumented DOS" book, my intro to hacking!
How about PC Techniques? I have several copies, covering such topics as building graphics libraries, B-Tree libraries, etc. When I told my son we used to hand code our "windows" and GUI apps, I don't think he understood, I have several code print-outs (on green-bar and 9pin dot matrix) to show him.
About a years worth of Programmers Journalm lots of articles about OOP.
Remember Byte magazine? How about the Byte Network BBS? I found the user manual (downloaded and printed out on a dot-matrix) for my Wildcat BBS I used to run at home.
DBASE III manual (plus the disks on 5 1/4" floppy). Turbo Pascal, and Windows 3.1.
A box full of assorted serial cable parts for making null-modems, RS232 TTY cables, Printer cables, etc. (Before there were local stores that sold them, we bought components through the mail and built our own)
A box of electronics plans and assorted parts, including my design of a laser beam communicator, that used a beam (from an early grocery store scanner) and a parabolic reflector to to communicate over a mile away. I never got it working actually, but thats the tech they use to bounce light off glass and pick up room vibrations, eavesdropping on the occupants - I think you can buy them in spy stores now)
All of the receipts from my first IBM "compatible", a smokin' 286-12mhz w/ 1 mb ram, (thats 36 DIP's kids, 8 + a parity in each bank) 60mb RLL drive, and a hercules graphics card. Also found the receipt where I upgraded to EGA for $160. (Recall I'd already studied up on extending ram!)
This was right after Intel released the details of their processor and manufacturers could finally compete with IBM. Before that, Compaq tried, and I can remember demoing them in the store, and they always locked up after a few minutes of running time. About all you could do was stare at the curser, if you tried to do anything, it locked up!
I also found all of my grad school notebooks. Every program I wrote had similar teacher comments " - 2 points, Need to document this ---> " LOL
Yep, that's why I liked UNIX so much. That Unisys 5000 (NCR Tower) w/ 32mb RAM just hummed along. If I broke something, a call to Unisys tech support was always answered by somebody who actually knew what they were doing. They would step me through compiling kernels, repairing file systems, and reading core dumps. MS was a joke in comparison, a toy, something to experiment with for those of us that didn't have $70K to drop on a real computer.