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Well, I guess thats the benefit of starting coding way before WIndows rolled along. It was a Spectrum I first wrote programs on, just for my own use, and actually really enjoyed it. It wasnt till much later that I startrd a career in programming, and that was on DOS, which again is simple.
Now I write WIndows drivers mostly, as well as LInux, and I am fully aware of the complexity of the OS, and how hard MSFT make it by producing junk code themselves ans almost useless documentation.
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I am sorry, it is not useless. It is fairly easy to get windows message numbers and their meaning if you want to trap them. Oh and applying a processor patch is easier than that if you can get the correct SDK (I almosttypes APK here  ).
sarcasm
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d@nish wrote: it is not useless
You might want to revise that opinion after reading the WDK...
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Anymore use of TLA's and I will have head out for a KFC!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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WTF? 
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You missed out on word sarcasm in small font size at the bottom of post, didn't you?
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I did, sorry. Thought it was a sig.
Yes,, glad you agree. 
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Mine was in VB copying and pasting a tutorial for a whack a mole game, which I then replaced the mole with my friends head.
As for my computer skills, I think I did the head picture by cutting it out in paint, I knew a tiny bit about ms dos but literally nothing compared to the vast overwhelming knowledge I know now. Which will be literally nothing compared to the vast super overhwelming knowledge I'll know in five years etc etc.
Simon Lee Shugar (Software Developer)
www.simonshugar.co.uk
"If something goes by a false name, would it mean that thing is fake? False by nature?" By Gilbert Durandil
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I had nearly forgotten: My Uni course was a "thin sandwich" - 6 months Uni, 6 months industry - and my first industrial training was this the Atlas Computer Division of the Rutherford Labs, a UK government research institution.
At the end of the training a report on my work was sent to the college: "Was determined to find out 'all about computers' and showed great ingenuity in doing so"
It wasn't a compliment. 
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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Hey Griff, I was at Rutherford 83-87. Any overlap?
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No - I was there the summer of '78, working for Rob Witty on Dimensional Flowcharting.
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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I didn't get interested in programming until I had already been using computers for several years. And I didn't even start programming on a PC, I started on a TI-84+. When I started programming on a PC, it was z80 asm, for TI-84+. By the time I finally started writing programs for PCs, I was pretty computer literate, in a Windows-centric way.
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.NOLIST
#define EQU .equ
#define equ .equ
#define END .end
#define end .end
#include "ti83plus.inc"
.LIST
.org 9D93h
.db $BB,$6D
xor a
ld (CURCOL),a
ld (CURROW),a
ld hl,text
B_CALL(_PutS)
ret
text:
.db "Hello, Harold!",0
.end
end
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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I found something very strikingly similar on wikibooks about TI83 Assembly 
"I've seen more information on a frickin' sticky note!" - Dave Kreskowiak
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Thats probably where I stole it from - but I made it more efficient: the original used "ld a,0" which is one M state and 3 T states slower, and uses a whole extra byte in memory! 
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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So, you're a TASM user? That's getting quite rare, Brass and SPASM are so much better that almost everyone switched.
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No - I haven't touched Z80 in years - and most of mine was IAR Z80 cross assembler/C compiler (Gawd damn it's rotten, black heart, may it rot in silicon Hades)
I stole that because I needed a Z80 environment you would be familiar with: my code was all home brewed on custom hardware and probably wouldn't have made a whole lot of sense to most people:
disp equ 4000h
#ORG 8000h
text: defs "Hello Harold!"
defb 0
textl equ $-text
#ORG 0000h
INI:
ld de,disp
ld b, 30
LOOP:
push de
push bc
ld hl,text
ld bc,textl
ldir
pop bc
pop hl
ld de, 80
add hl, de
ex hl, de
djnz LOOP
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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A 80x30 textmode screen memory-mapped at 4000h? Makes enough sense, very different from a TI-84+ (and its highly annoying display) though obviously.
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Yeah, with a separate attributes plane mapped at 0x5000 - so a massive hole in the memory preventing the EPROM being bigger than 16Kb... and no MMU in those days!
I loved the HD64180 when we started using that because of the 1Mb memory space and a built in MMU. Bliss!
And the SIO came in handy too.
I was still using that in some new equipment designs in 2000, in its 32MHz form (purely because of the legacy Z80 code base, I moved to Arm processors as quickly as I could)
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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I also loved the Z80 because it was easy to memorise all the opcodes. I progressed to RML380Z from a home brew 8080 machine which I had to program in hex. Those were the days.
I may not last forever but the mess I leave behind certainly will.
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My first program was written when some company brought a box and some cards with holes in them into school and said they could have it if one of their kids could write a program for it. I hadn't even heard of the word computer back then. No idea even what language I wrote it in, the ultimate in cut and paste, if you can call it that with a hole punch!
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I started off with a Timex Sinclair computer in 1980 or so with a black and white t.v. set as the display and a cassette drive as the "mass" storage
"I've seen more information on a frickin' sticky note!" - Dave Kreskowiak
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Not very.
Wrote my first program in Pascal on a Multics time-sharing system using punch cards (1980) before graduating to a VAX in 1981.
/ravi
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Ravi,
I'll have you know that I worked on that CPU long before you accessed it via time-sharing. I worked for GE and brought these 645 CPUs up just after they had been manufactured. The CPUs didn't even run (typically) without swapping out several (discrete component) boards and correcting several wiring errors (no LSI in this era). My first real programming experience was to write a small (4 punch cards) program (manually punched using a keypunch in multi-punch mode) that could be booted and the program could be hardware single stepped through its execution and would check out the memory segmentation LRU logic to determine which segment descriptor to discard in order to load a new descriptor. This program was later used to debug a replacement LSI implementation of the discrete component logic circuts (trust me, the engineers first try was totally hosed).
I'll give you a "not very", and raise you a "really not very".
Dave.
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Nice! 
/ravi
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