My Wayback Machine
Back in the Late '70s I was early into the home computer hobby. I got involved with an early TRS-80 Model I with a whopping 4k of 8 bit memory. There were only two string functions in the tiny BASIC that was available at the time. Each of the strings could hold 40 characters. We were involved in doing very rudimentary programs just trying to figure out what we could do with these things.

Some of my first programming efforts, after getting my computer to say "HI BOB" 10 times in separate lines (oh yes, there was only upper case). Were simple data bases, like creating my own check register (yes, I am anal enough to still have those records of checks I wrote in late '78 ) And all checks since.

In those days we were concerned with things like which type of sort algorithm was the fastest. I can remember guys in the computer club discussing setting up inventories of products. Trying to figure out how to schedule shifts for people like police officers. How do we fit in maximum work hours, time for rest, holiday and vacation coverage.

We were fortunate enough to have a way of saving our work to an audio cassette. The computer generated audio tones that were saved to tape and understood by the computer when played back. Just for the record, I broke out one of the machines I had in storage last year for the 25th anniversary (2003). With a little fiddling of the volume control (just the same as back in the '70s) the screen indicated that it was reading one of my old tapes.

This brought about one of the first periferals in our little world of home computing. A Modem - well not really, but it had the same effect it let us swap programs by telephone. We took a device sold by Radio Shack as a phone loud speaker. It had a handset cradle with a mike in one end and a plug in speaker in a little box. The speaker happened to be small enough that you could fit it in the end of the cradle that didn't have the mike. Then we just place the hand set in it so the speaker was under the phone pick up and the mike under the earphone. A simple connection to the cassette input and output on the computer and a little coordination between operators and one computer sends a program to another. Not very sophisticated but doable.

Printers were another problem, with tiny BASIC and 4k of memory there wasn't much to print. But we started to expand. I upgraded to 256kb of memory. No sticks, 8 separate chips that cost $250.00, almost what I paid for the computer to begin with. We upgraded to a bigger BASIC with what was called a Level II chip. Now we could start to write games and have some fun with word processing and data bases. Now we were ready for printers, at first there were line printers that Required you to buffer an entire line before printing, then there were IBM Selectric printers which were fancy electric typewriters that didn't have keyboard. My first printer cost me $1124.00.

By 1980 there were all kind of games to play, but with basic block video and one color these were still a bit less than what you are used to. But there were enough text adventures and an occasional one that used text characters to represent pictures on the screen that my wife had to have her own computer. One of the more memorable games with video was "Round the Horn" which let you take a sailing ship from New York to San Francisco. The ship's sails and forecastle were depicted on the screen with ASCI graphics and the picture would change with the wind and your heading. When you got near the coast you could see it on the screen. Big time excitement.

The big breakthrough in printers came with the Epson MX-80. This was the first relatively cheap printer available to the home user. It was an Eight pin printer that poked a line of pins into a typewriter ribbon to place dots on the paper. The eight pins were controlled by binary numbers so to create a character you started with a graph paper and figured out the sequence of numbers That would give you the shape of a letter or character you wanted. Then you converted these numbers to hexidecimal numbers and loaded them into a long String that the printer would output as your text. This lead to custom fonts which were initially exchanged between users and then became a business.

By now we had true modems and wonderful things like users groups were springing up. Living near the space center I had access to several within my local calling area. these were loaded with programs and ASCI graphics, including the first pornography. The next step was a wonderful thing called COMP USERVE. This wonderful service provided different areas for different computers since what would run on an Apple wouldn't run on a trs-80 and so on. I decided to share some of my own work as payback for all the programs I had received. This was the way we all worked to learn and share.

About this time people started realizing there was money to be made from these programs and the American Society of Shareware Professionals was formed. This sounded like a good option to me and I had worked out a geography program based on a globe in the computer. I had written this program as much for my kids to learn geography as for me to further my programming abilities. Since this was the way things were going I joined the Society and put my first version of World on COMPUSERVE as shareware. My initial price was $5.00.

I started to get a bit of press and cards and letters from literally around the world. As the years went by I kept tuning my data bases and Decided to do a version of the program specifically designed for tracking hurricanes in the Atlantic. I made a version which allowed dynamic Tracking of shuttle launches and flights in real time as well as in fast mode. I created a program for use on the shuttle booster recovery Ships that not only tracked the shuttle launch but also the tracks of both recovery vessels.

At some point I just decided to increase the Shareware volentary payment to $10. At no time was there any limitations on the program nor any promises to change anything upon receipt of payment but all of a sudden the money started to roll in from everywhere. I must have received US dollars from close to one hundred different countries. I was having articles written about the program everywhere. A local TV station Asked for a version of the hurricane tracker to make available to their viewers. Then I received a call from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They wanted a version of the program to use in case of nuclear or chemical accident. It would have to take into account current winds and point out who needed to be notified of approaching danger.

Some of these variants were written in Visual Basic for DOS. At some point Windows began to take over for DOS and I just didn't feel like Rewriting the programs to stay current with Windows so I just let them die a natural death. The money kept coming for a surprising period of time. The programs certainly run in Windows and still do in a command window on even current versions of Windows, including XP. The last update to these programs was made in the mid '90s and they were oriented to the wonders of VGA and EGA graphics cards. For those of you that don't remember these cards they had limited resolution and a maximum of 4 colors at a time.

Since these programs do still run in windows -- don't be upset when your screen switches change resolution and the graphics are clumsy all will return to normal when the program finishes or you exit from it. I have put together three of these programs as zip files. There was no such thing as a setup file when these programs were written so It will take just a tiny bit of effort to unzip any of the programs you are interested in seeing into their own directory. If you unzip more than one program into the same directory it may just make the program you want to run loose it's mind and try to read a data base that is for one of the other programs. Once you have unzipped the program to it's own directory then navigate to that directory and select the .exe file. Explorer works just fine for this. When you have had whatever fun you want out of the program you can just delete the directory and all will be gone. There are no registry entrys or other fancy things they won't appear in your ADD or REMOVE list or anywhere you don't put them.

Of course I will deny any implication that my programs caused your monitor to explode or your wife to divorce you in a court of law if required. And I'm sure that Windows and Explorer and about half the other words used here are registered, copywrite , or otherwise owned by MICROSOFT

The easiest way to get these files is just put your cursor on the underlined word and hit the right button then select Save Target As.

First off I offer the root of all my evil World.zip There are many ways you can display maps in this program. The unique feature of all these maps is that they are centered around any point on the earth you choose, not just a map of the United States but a map of the United States with your chosen point at the center of the screen. You can start with a latitude and longitude or a city name. There are names of world capitals, state capitals, and some random cities in the data base. When you choose something like Country capitals you will be presented with a list of names, use the number to select the name. From here on you will be presented with a number of choices about how you want your map to appear. I believe they all have a default choice indicated by [ ] surrounding the default value. There is even a name game where you are presented with a random map. Generally entering 99 will exit you back to the main menu or out of the program.

Next I offer a version of the hurricane tracking program hurricane.zip. This program allows you to select a home location somewhere on the east coast of the USA and input data from whatever source you have on the location and strength of storms and plot their tracks. There are data bases of historical records of storms since they started keeping records of them. You can check the path of an individual storm by name or a collection of storms. You select as group by using your arrow keys to scroll the list. Individual Storms are chosen from a list by typing its year and name, for example: 54carol. With the speed of today's computers the maps and tracks almost appear instantly. Back in the day you could see the tracks being drawn but these were considered fast drawings.

Finally we have the "Fallout Predictor" Fallpred.zip that was used by FEMA in Colorado mountain and in their backup center in Reston VA. They require the input of Wind vectors and I have supplied a default and a spare. These were something that the National Weather service supplied about every six hours. These wind vectors and a data base of locations provide the inputs for these maps that show the expected wind dispersal of whatever. This program will accept lat and long for input or partial names and will search for the input and give you a choice of originations if necessary. Once the map is presented you can get a listing of places in the fallout shield by pressing your f key. These are shown by hourly zones with county emergency centers highlighted in yellow.

Each of these programs has several files it can use, these are simple text files. The .DOC files were named before Word adopted that extension and are simple text files as well. I hope you enjoy your look back into primitive programming.


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