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Agreed. After I got of a planning call for a College of Commissioner Science (BSA training) I asked my wife "when did I become one of the elders in this council?"
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I was writing a response to a thread and talking about one of the first programming books I ever read (after C++ For Dummies), Programming Windows 3.1 by Charles Petzold.
I discovered you can read the entire book at archive.org: Programming Windows 3.1 : Petzold, Charles, 1953- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive[^]
Before you start reading you should know about the hardware requirements as listed by the author:
To best run Windows and the development tools, you need the following hardware:
■ An IBM personal computer (or compatible) based on the Intel 80386 microprocessor with a hard disk and 4 megabytes (MB) of memory running MS-DOS 3-3 or later.
■ A graphics display and video board, preferably compatible with the IBM VGA (Video Graphics Array) or better.
■ A mouse. Although a mouse is generally optional for most Windows programs, some of the programs in this book require one.
Not everyone had a mouse. 
It's such a stroll down memory lane.
Also, he mentions:
from Preface The chapter on text and fonts focuses on another Windows 3.1 enhancement — the introduction of the scalable outline font technology known as TrueType.
Because you've probably never heard of TrueType fonts (TTF). 
#### UPDATE : Get Source Code #######
If you want the source code for the examples in the book you can download them via this link: https://charlespetzold.com/src/ProgWin31.zip[^]
modified 29-Aug-24 10:03am.
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I still have my dead-tree version of this book and of its sequel, Programming Windows 95. But then, I'm a packrat (aka hoarder).
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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ditto for me, Daniel. and not just books.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
modified 30-Aug-24 0:45am.
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I threw out a number of old books some years ago (unrelated: my local library doesn't accept anything older than 5 years, WTF) but I made a point of keeping that one.
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I just finished rewriting my windows FON file processing code. I use 16-bit win3.1 raster font files for one of my text drawing options in my embedded graphics lib. I found some python code for picking apart the file and ported it to C++ to make it work with my graphics lib. Blast from the past. The fonts work great though.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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That book started me on my so called career as a programmer. After reading his implementation of a hex editor I thought long and hard for 15 minutes and decided I could do better. I then spent the next 4 years implementing the world's then only user configurable binary file editor aka "FileRay". A copy can be found on the Wayback machine. By the way if you need such an editor I highly recommend the only one of its kind today id est "010 Editor" by Sweetscape Software. It is a pleasure to utilize.
"If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?" - George Carlin
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Well mate you just suggested me a piece of software I always looked for. Kudos to you!
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
The shortest horror story: On Error Resume Next
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I remember those pre Windows 3.0/3.1 days. Three of us students had done our research computations in Fortran, using Watfor compiler, and written our PhD theses, using Tex typesetting software, on a PC XT, with total hard disk space of 20 MB, running DOS 6.22. Using Ghostscript to convert the .tex files to PS files.
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Petzold is an OG. Home dude even got the infamous Windows tattoo. Talk about dedication.  Hard to go wrong with any of his books.
IMO there are meh books and then there are great books that you never forget because they had such an impact. Most of the old skool ones are out of print, but if you're willing to pay for them these are by far some of the best books on their respective subjects.
Win32 Programming. Talks about not using MFC to do Windows coding. Since MSDN dumped all their old info, it's still handy to have around. I emailed Joseph Newcomer once to get permission to post a routine in that book in a CP article. He's pretty cool dude.
Assembly Language Step-By-Step IMO this was the best book ever to teach ASM to beginners. This dude took concepts that few people talked about and made it read so easy. There's a second edition that covers Linux ASM, but the first edition is for DOS. Never read the second edition, but I'd bet its good too.
Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book. This right here is the bible on graphics programming in DOS. These days the vast majority of this info is outdated, but you will learn more about the history of graphics programming from this book than any other. It's a big book though. I never even finished it. But, it's literally the book for DOS graphics... bar none. You can probably find a PDF of it it was so well known back then.
I'm sure there are newer books that are awesome, but if you wanna go retro...
Jeremy Falcon
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Those are all great ones.
Duntemann is one of my all-time favorite tech authors.
I read that original book and he taught me stuff you just couldn't learn elsewhere.
I recently posted about reading through his updated version (just came out 1 year ago or so).
x64 Assembly Language Step-by-Step: Programming with Linux (Tech Today) 4th Edition[^]
It's as good as the original and has some of the original text / stories in it. 
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Holy crap, he's still at it. I wanna read it too. 
Jeremy Falcon
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Forgot to mention, Joseph Newcomer even wrote 50 some-odd articles for CP. He's the one and the same as that book author.
Jeremy Falcon
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He wrote a lot of MSDN articles too IIRC
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Fancy, seeing that book makes me wonder whatever happened to Tom Archer. He be gone.
Jeremy Falcon
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Which Tom Archer do you mean? Google returns about 10,000 Tom Archers.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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This Tom Archer. He used to be an active CPian and we were good buddies. Been years since I last chatted with him though.
Jeremy Falcon
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This book started me on my journey as a Windows developer in 1992. I still have my first edition copy and hope to get it autographed by Charles some day.
/ravi
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raddevus wrote: Not everyone had a mouse
The first PC I bought (a CompuAdd 486 in 1992) came with DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 -- I assumed it included a mouse and then had to return to the store for one. 
modified 29-Aug-24 20:49pm.
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A mouse story from the very early 1990s: The program that was so large that you had to take the PC cover off to give it enough space:
In the days of DOS / Windows transition I was teaching at a small tech college. Another teacher was running a DOS database application (db II? My memory may fail on this), but her PC crashed fatally at application startup. She suspected a hardware problem, and took the PC to the service guys. They put it on their work desk, attached monitoring equipment at vital points on the mainboard. The db application ran flawlessly.
They put the cover back on, returned the PC to the teacher's desk - and it failed. They took it back to the service desk: No problems. This turned out to be consistent: At the service desk, no problem occurred. At the lecturer's desk it failed.
When the problem was diagnosed correctly, it turned out to be a function of the cover being off or on. When the cover was off, it worked fine; with the cover on, it failed. The cover was of the slide-backwards type. Lots of tower cabinets of the day was deliberately made that way to make sure you unplug the power cable to get access to the electronics. You would unplug everything at the rear panel, to the all the cables out of the way. Then you plug back in the things you need for the testing.
The DOS database application was not mouse based. At least it didn't require a mouse (anyway, the crash occurred at start up). So, at the service desk, noone thought of plugging in the mouse. When returned to the teacher's desk, the PC was installed properly, plugging in the mouse as well. When the PC booted, DOS loaded the mouse driver, maybe a couple hundred bytes. It searched for a mouse, found it and said 'Fine - mouse available!' So a couple hundred bytes less RAM was available for the application. Most DOS applications were poor at detecting/handling out-of-memory conditions; they just assumed where there is an address, there will be RAM. There wasn't.
At the service desk, there was no use for the mouse, so the service guys never thought of plugging it in after sliding off the cover. At boot time, the driver sought for a mouse, found none, and unloaded itself, releasing RAM used by the driver code. These couple hundred bytes extra was enough for the database application not to run into an out-of-memory condition. Until the real reason was detected, it appeared as if the application would work with the cover off, but not with the cover on.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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He is a brilliant author
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
modified 30-Aug-24 4:24am.
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I still have a hard copy of this book on my shelf!
The fun thing is that most of the Win16 code in the book still works with very few modifications in Win32 on Windows 11.
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raddevus wrote: Because you've probably never heard of TrueType fonts
Wait, are TrueType fonts no longer a thing?
There are no solutions, only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell
A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.
- Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes)
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Memories of learning programming with GWBASIC on DOS 4.0. It was already OLD when I started (it was the year 1998) but I could use a dismissed Compaq 486 laptop as my test bench and I already knew how to set up a machine with any DOS and Windows system (learnt way back in 1995, I was 7) so I wasn't new to the command line and I couldn't mess the home computer.
In 2002 my dad got me VisualStudio 6 and a very good VB6 book, which actually got me into "serious" programming. Boy did I suck. My only software wrote as a self-taught programmer did work but was everything a program shouldn't be. Fortune wanted the language we developed in high school from the 3rd year was exactly VB6 and the teacher was awesome in teaching the basics (from flow chart to pseudocode, troubleshooting technicques and formal verification). I also later learnt she also taught my first Computer Science college professor, who was awesome as well.
Sorry for rambling, it was just a trip down memory lane.
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
The shortest horror story: On Error Resume Next
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