Dumb Question for the month

Petrus Vorster · April 22, 2022, 11:41:40 AM

Hi Gents

What a surprise that such an old thing could get us chatting again.
What triggered me in the beginning was when i asked someone how does microsoft do the form move thing.
We all use it, but do we understand how that works?

Then i went back to the VB dos days and could not figure that out either.
then i saw a Point of sale recently in quite a big company that sells odd stuff like you would call a dollar store over there. They have hundreds of branches and i saw it was 'n ascii based dos point of sale.

No, it was not! They run on windows 10, do card swipes and it does not run in a dosbox of any kind.
And it had a dos-look form that can move.

That just triggered my mind completely.

Thanks for the inputs, I will go look at all these things.
Its always good to understand the mechanics of a process.

Regards, Peter

raymw · April 22, 2022, 07:11:58 PM

I resemble that remark

QuoteWhat a surprise that such an old thing could get us chatting again.

before then, talking about home pc's, I won a Tandy trs80, a competition when the Bristol tandy business centre opened. When I got it, I thought they had put my name in the boot sequence. Later i found out as well as having a 64 character wide screen, it could be switched to larger characters, but only 32 characters per line. When it finished booting, it would display 'READY> but sometimes it was 'RAY'. Eventually I realised that in 32 char mode, it displayed odd characters only.

Petrus Vorster · April 25, 2022, 03:59:20 PM

Daniel P. Stasinski

I managed to find his personal website/blog.
He is but 6 years older than me.
Left a contact message.
Lets Hope.

Petrus Vorster · April 26, 2022, 04:31:42 AM

Great.
I had a chat with him too!

He still has the original disks and will give it to me.
Lets see if i can learn something out of this.

Regards,

Peter

Petrus Vorster · April 26, 2022, 10:16:27 AM

QuoteTandy trs80

I had to Google that. :-)

First computer i ever typed anything on was a Commodore 64.
It was in a store on display and i managed to do print "hallo".
Very much impressed with myself.

First PC i owned was a 486 Ibm. My386 Buddies were SO jealous!
My best game were Prince of Persia 2!!

Fun times.

-Peter

Bumblebee · April 27, 2022, 01:12:29 PM

My first was a VIC-20. Less than 4K memory, cassette tape storage, poke and peek in place of an assembler. Great memories!

Prior to that, our high school had Apple II machines. Have been a BASIC slacker ever since.

Petrus Vorster · April 28, 2022, 03:53:34 AM

Just for interest. Daniel Stasinski gave me the original "visual designer" for quickbasic.
I have to run it in Dosbox.
It will take some time to work through its libraries but the DRAG BOX function looks Exactly like VB DOS. Draws a frame, then move that and re-draws it at a new position.
It is cool to see the fore-runner of things like a DRAG BAR, Controls, Windows and Buttons.

I believe this concludes this thread.
Thanks for the inputs. I now know more that i did a few weeks ago.

Regards, Peter