Hi from Wellington New Zealand
Posted: Thu Dec 26, 2013 9:10 pm
I'm Kevin O'Brien from Wellington, NZ. You can see more of me and where I live here on my wife's blogsite http://revfelicity.org/about/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
My work with computers goes back over 40 years when I learnt to program on a Monroe 1620 calculator. We popped out holes in pre-cut cards but after a while some of the pre-punched bits fell out on their own - self modifying programs?
I was part of Zilab Systems Ltd which in 1976 designed and built a 64Kb 4Mhz Z80 computer with the aim of doing house plan drafting. We had CPM I,a 256 byte ROM, Friden Telteype IO, 8" Floppy, home built plotter and a basic which was rebuilt to emulate the advanced HP decimal arithmetic. The circuitry was largely designed by a, then, Post Office tech one Sunday afternoon over his kitchen table and the S Bus mother board hand built and wire wrapped.
Wang basic was fun to work with too: 4Kb workspace and 48Kb ROM. You could directly address the disk IO so those terminals quickly got turned into accounting machines and IBM never figured it out why small, beautiful and fast interpreted coding left their developments projects in the dust.
Clipper Summer 87 was a major work tool along with numerous libraries. Those were days of ferment One Xbase compiler left us with local copies of index files on each workstation; any changes were purely local, and that for a Gym membership system. Long dark hours...
In latter years I had a computer sales and service shop which I retired from in 1997. Recently I have returned to my old love of accounting software previously having sold and installed more packages than I can remember. Being qualified as an accountant I find many accounting programs show a lack of understanding of accounting principles and methods. One, Quick Books, enabled a client to make an irrecoverable mess and I had to reprocess all his work elsewhere to prepare the financial statements.
I was another casualty of Windows/Clipper development timing ; unfortunately I no longer have the code. It's great to discover the re-emergence of xBase. I have a paper from a university advocating it should be taught in preference to Basic because of its productivity. I second that. Thanks to Robert Lopez for the simple MiniGui. There are two types of coders out there and many potential productive ones do not think in the abstract mathematical way that is now being enforced. If you cannot comprehend a program how can you maintain it? IBM's APL had that problem: there were competitions for single line programs that could achieve the most work. The coder could probably not explain them the following week. Mathematical thinking and verbal skills seem seldom to go together and I believe that HMG fills the needs of the verbally inclined and that there are more of them than the mathematicians. I am seeing the re-discovery of a new common language along with desirable extensibility and dialects.
Now a quick help request. I am sure I have seen instructions for installing HMG to run in Linux and compile to executable Linux binaries. I haven't been able to find these as expected.
Regards and Blessings of the season to all
Kevin
My work with computers goes back over 40 years when I learnt to program on a Monroe 1620 calculator. We popped out holes in pre-cut cards but after a while some of the pre-punched bits fell out on their own - self modifying programs?
I was part of Zilab Systems Ltd which in 1976 designed and built a 64Kb 4Mhz Z80 computer with the aim of doing house plan drafting. We had CPM I,a 256 byte ROM, Friden Telteype IO, 8" Floppy, home built plotter and a basic which was rebuilt to emulate the advanced HP decimal arithmetic. The circuitry was largely designed by a, then, Post Office tech one Sunday afternoon over his kitchen table and the S Bus mother board hand built and wire wrapped.
Wang basic was fun to work with too: 4Kb workspace and 48Kb ROM. You could directly address the disk IO so those terminals quickly got turned into accounting machines and IBM never figured it out why small, beautiful and fast interpreted coding left their developments projects in the dust.
Clipper Summer 87 was a major work tool along with numerous libraries. Those were days of ferment One Xbase compiler left us with local copies of index files on each workstation; any changes were purely local, and that for a Gym membership system. Long dark hours...
In latter years I had a computer sales and service shop which I retired from in 1997. Recently I have returned to my old love of accounting software previously having sold and installed more packages than I can remember. Being qualified as an accountant I find many accounting programs show a lack of understanding of accounting principles and methods. One, Quick Books, enabled a client to make an irrecoverable mess and I had to reprocess all his work elsewhere to prepare the financial statements.
I was another casualty of Windows/Clipper development timing ; unfortunately I no longer have the code. It's great to discover the re-emergence of xBase. I have a paper from a university advocating it should be taught in preference to Basic because of its productivity. I second that. Thanks to Robert Lopez for the simple MiniGui. There are two types of coders out there and many potential productive ones do not think in the abstract mathematical way that is now being enforced. If you cannot comprehend a program how can you maintain it? IBM's APL had that problem: there were competitions for single line programs that could achieve the most work. The coder could probably not explain them the following week. Mathematical thinking and verbal skills seem seldom to go together and I believe that HMG fills the needs of the verbally inclined and that there are more of them than the mathematicians. I am seeing the re-discovery of a new common language along with desirable extensibility and dialects.
Now a quick help request. I am sure I have seen instructions for installing HMG to run in Linux and compile to executable Linux binaries. I haven't been able to find these as expected.
Regards and Blessings of the season to all
Kevin
