Hell, I think I have pages of assembler code printouts around here that you can read if you want. -At least if I can find them. They may have gone to the recycle bin in the last cleanup. They were printed on greenbar with a band printer. I know I have stacks of Fortran-IV cards also that I kept for posterity. I even have paper tape!

 

I used to play around with BASIC quite a bit, but never did anything ambitious until I got tired of loading cnc machine programs into one of our lathes at work through a tape reader. We found an article in one of the trade journals that gave a short BASIC program that allowed you to dump your tape reader output into a pc and store the data on disk for easy retrieval. The lathe had an rs-232 port on it, so we added to the BASIC program a couple of "menus" with options like: "save program from lathe", "print program", "send program to lathe", and after we got used to that, we found out that the lathe would accept tool offset info in a similar fashion..... We dusted off our keyboards and figured out how to build an array in BASIC for storing the tool offsets. Alot of brain-tease work, but it was worth it! Newer machines already have a "library" that you can input your tool offsets into, and they're very nice. I've heard that "C" languge is sort of like BASIC and that you can use it to compile a BASIC program into an "EXE" file that will run alot faster. Aren't computers & machines cool?

 

Oh man, it's been a few years since I had to write anything in 8086 assembler.. What an interesting experience that was. I was convinced it was their way of torturing me. Now, I am just glad it's something I'll never have to use again.

And, yeah, text boxes were never part of it for us, we stayed right on the bottom layer.

 

Hey, I still have the code printout for the DOS Kernell for a 286 processer. Lots of pages of code. Fun stuff, but I don't think I would mess with it today. Now Fortran was fun. They even have Visual Fortran out there.... my boss keeps the catalog page up on his bulletin board. We are in the process of going to .NET and discuss whether to use C or VB when the discussion starts he and I tend to suggest Fortran... why not, It will work in the .NET environment...

If you are going to play with assembler why not go down to machine language. I remember the course where we had to write a program in machine to make the leds light up to say the course name. EE121.. boy that was fun.. not to practical but fun... whoops I probably shouldn't say things like that in public, people think I'm strange enough as it is.

Joe