Problem - "IDS?"
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OK, good to know! Thanks.
Got time for another short story? lol
No, they weren’t newbie programmers, the guys I worked with were supporting Burroughs and later on IBM Operating Systems and utilities who had been in the business a very long time but had got away with few error-traps or docs until I was sent along to bug them. It was pioneering and continuous work, fixing the OS by patching! Forever being told “Don’t worry, it’ll all be fixed in Version 3.0!” Which eventually came along with so many more of its own bugs! But in those days we also had the 16kb limit on program size (any of you guys remember that?) so we (they) used error numbers and translated them in separate documentation - which never got written, especially the Burroughs ones!
They were much older than me then, and most of them are sadly probably deceased by now. Great guys, I enjoyed riling them. They took it well from a young upstart engineer though, our pinnacles of Software Support! Of course I got a lot of “do me a favour - piss off and get me a Fresh Banana Coffee from Brazil, will you!” - and I loved it when I came back with a supportable-by-evidence “HA! That patch didn’t work either! There’s the dump! Back on your Heads, you Scurvy Sysprogs!”. No Banana coffee though, only machine-black hot water, with and without sugar!
In those days we could smoke in offices, and the sysprogs could always be easily identified even if you didn’t know them - any desk surrounded by 8 to 10 6-7ft stacks of continuous-forms printout (dumps) and a cloud of cigarette smoke billowing upwards from behind, with loud keytapping noises accompanied by the occasional loud curse! That was a sysprog.
I worked loosely with the last couple of sysprogs of the same generation when we were working on Y2K compliance on ICL machines, one was 60 and the other 63! There was also a big shortage of programmers worldwide then. These two of mine had to revamp an awful lot (I think it was about 25 million lines between them) of mainly COBOL programs and had an awful time unravelling the authors’ work and thought-processes from the previous 2 decades! I kept telling them it was because they and their colleagues of those days had been LMDUs! lol
They did wonders anyway, writing their own utilities to automate as much of the work as possible, testing and retesting, setting up very complex test systems, and Y2K went without a hitch for our customers. They were all unsung heroes in my opinion, and not to be forgotten, working 12-18 hours a day for weeks on end including weekends to make it in time on limited budgets. If there had been an anti-smoking law then it would have been broken worldwide by sysprogs and they would have been working from jail!
And all because of lazy space-saving 2-digit programmers! Heheheh.
If any of you remember there had even been a stupid panic to not use lifts in case they crashed or went to emergency position with a load of passengers!
Ah, the fun days! You young guys don’t know what you missed!
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My first computer was the Amstrad CPC 464, 64K total memory (including video), using tape. I used it right up until the end of '94. That’s partly why I include the source for everything, since I grew up with type-ins.
As far as Res2RC goes, if you don’t know the command line, it’s probably no good to you anyway. But point taken (still doesn’t mean I’ll write readme’s, though).
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adoxa wrote:
My first computer was the Amstrad CPC 464Ah… the classic Z80! From CP/M to Pac-Man to military flight avionics, it is a classic.
Was that machine your motivator to become fluent in assembly language?
Your documentation may be terse but it usually does the job. Headers in the source are more important than readme files.
The only thing I ever had trouble with was the “topics” in Console… I kept typing “help ships” until I finally figured out that I should type “help player” instead.
@Startrader: So, if I understand your story correctly, then you were partially responsible for creating that Y2K problem in the first place?
(Just kidding)
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Far from it, I was not a sysprog, sadly - I would be earning tons of money today if I had gone that way instead of fixing processors. Actually the majority of our problems were in disk and tape subsystems and printers as processors became more reliable.
My involvement with the sysprogs was because I had overall responsibility for a major customer who had 3 large systems, the largest in the UK, and I had to prod and poke our sysprogs in supporting that customer with (continuous!) quick fixes to the Operating Systems and applications and utilities - hence the stacks of dumps. That happened in two stages in my career, and sysprogs were integral to our hardware teams.
And then in the late 90’s I was involved in supporting those ICL customers via the 2 sysprogs who were making the fixes for them. Somehow, IBM systems were not so affected but IBM nonetheless made an awful lot of money selling “Y2K-compliant” upgrades!
adoxa - OK, how about making me or BW your Technical Writer? Tell him what it’s supposed to do, and he can write your docs while you bash out more utilities.
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Sure, if you’d like to write the docs, I’ll update the zips. I just feel that for these basic utilities, the normal help screen is enough. But as you point out, only for those that know to use the command line.
Learning assembly was just a natural progression, since that was basically the only choice after BASIC. I did have a Pascal compiler, but it produced 10K programs at a minimum, which is quite a lot when you have to load it from tape. All the editors I used were line-based, glad those days are over. When I first saw Turbo Pascal’s syntax highlighting, I was so impressed, I managed to do it for BASIC listings. One of the most useful things I ever wrote. Had a few type-ins published (one in an Aus mag and three in two UK mags).
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Cool.
I don’t envy you doing the type-in assembly work but, on the other hand, you developed an awesome set of skills from having done it.
Here is a DLL-building Tutorial for the people who do not already have a C++ compiler:
How to Compile a .DLL from a .RC Script
I think that StarTrader was just kidding about not knowing how to run a console app. If there is real interest, I could make a tutorial on that, as well. However, I assume that most modders already know the basics of how to use their computers.
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Needs a nice post to balance that “last” one…
My 1st PC… if you could call it that, was a Oric 16k… i still have her
& the manual & program book (i spent 6 days coding space invaders only to mess it at the end when i went to load it down to my tapedrive… dam…) thing had the strangest keyboard you’ll ever see… more like today’s pda raised keys than an actual keyboard… fun times.But yepers… even those that are quite good at scanning code & learning therefrom need a quick guide every now and then as to what does what for that, n, stuff
If anything it helps more on the “foggy” days when i just aint at 100%. -
Xarian_Prime wrote:
Needs a nice post to balance that “last” one…If you thought something was not “nice” then it was probably a translation error, Xarian.
I posted a tutorial with screenshots, offered to make another tutorial, complemented adoxa, and StarTrader already said that he was kidding.
This entire thread has been “nice”! Sorry if the jokes don’t always translate properly… I have found humor to be the most difficult thing to understand in other languages.
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<st punches=“” the=“” rofl=“” button=“” he=“” doesn’t=“” have…=“”>:D</st>
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StarTrader wrote:
“and then when I have published the fix and made the mod stable, I will retire from FL gaming”BOOOOO…
This would suck tremdously large donkey appendage…
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lolz… i meant “my” last post… ye know, the one about doors 'n a$$es… :pint:
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Xarian_Prime wrote:
lolz… i meant “my” last post… ye know, the one about doors 'n a$$es… :pint:Definitely a translation error there… that was your first post in this thread!
So I obviously have no clue what “last post” you are talking about, but thank you for your “clarification”.
I think…
:S
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CynicalRaver - You did What? You sucked a donkey’s appendage???!!! Is this a regular thing you do?
Well I know I wouldn’t be telling anyone if I had.
Care to translate?
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LOL
No…
Im just saying would blow if you stopped FL stuff.
Who would i bother with my noobish questions?
FriendlyFire? - Prob ban meGypsy
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Yeh, he came close to banning me!
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Btw - is there anyway to replace this “IDS?” by “Unknown” for example?
Theoreticaly when the number is wrong for ids_info for example it must be = null? -
Oh thx! Searched IDS? but it is “I D S ?”. Huh.
