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Mircea Neacsu wrote: If you make a list of what you have, count me among those interested. Good luck!
I'll put you on the list, Mircea. This won't be soon, but it's something I have to do! I wonder if my copy of ProLog for DOS will run on Windows 11? AI is starting to look big!
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger Wright wrote: ProLog for DOS
I remember this from my first year in the college. We had to create a maze and save the Little Mermaid using a predicate language. I feel old now.
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My old DOS based TurboProlog doesn't work on Win11.
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Pretty sure you can spin up a Win 95 in a VM on Windows 11. Win 95 ran on MS/PC-DOS (it was shell on top) so that instance would have it.
And, if I recall correctly from somewhere (either this site or a story in the newsletter) you can run Win 95 without a license now.
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Ah, Turbo everything. Back when I had more money than time, I bought everything Borland came up with. Aside from Pascal I never got further than the equivalent of Hello World with most of it. I should have spent the money on Microsoft stock.
I may still have the box that Paradox came in. It was just the right size for an early IoT prototype.
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Oh my goodness, hahaha, when I started college doing graphic design, if someone had a 1GB zip, they were considered rich... 🤣🤣🤣
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Lose the guns and ammo. That will free up some space for non-lethal books and so on.
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Roger, here's what I would do...
Imagine that you are going to move into a new house and the move is 1000+ miles away. You can pack a couple of pods or drive a rental truck and the new house is a typical 3/2 with a garage. Then play take it or leave it.
Anything in the leave-it category can get divided into groups like dumpster, thrift store, and sell. Storage isn't cheap and moving it is even more expensive.
I had stuff on 5-1/4 floppies a few years ago. I gave some to a coworker for wall decorations, recycled the boxes and books and trashed other stuff. I hadn't looked at them in a zillion years, I don't have any box with a 3-1/2 drive, no less 5-1/4. I have one with a DVD that hasn't been on for years and whatever valuables that are on it aren't worth anything.
If you have time, look at Ebay and see if anything has any interest. Don't look at 'for sale', look at sold. In most cases, it isn't worth the cost (and hassle) of shipping.
People will often take some of the stuff for free, and they'll do the same thing you're doing with it; put it on a shelf and never look at it again. Declutter!
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Do you have a copy of BitFont source code? I wrote it and distributed it for a fee in the 1980s but lost the code on unreadable floppies. There is a line of code that I want: one line I wrote to get the day from the date in any year, taking into account leap years and maybe centuries.
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That's easy. If you want it in C here it is, day of the week from day, month year:
int dow (int y, int m, int d)
{
static char const t[] = {0, 3, 2, 5, 0, 3, 5, 1, 4, 6, 2, 4};
y -= m < 3;
return (y + y/4 - y/100 + y/400 + t[m-1] + d) % 7;
}
I know I'm not supposed to post code in the lounge but it's for a good cause 
Mircea
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 Thanks! But I got it all in one single line of Turbo Pascal code. That's what I wanted to replicate, just because.
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Thanks! Been there before. Got the distributable but not the source code.
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I'm not a hoarder or a nostalgic kind of guy.
Scrap and Recycle all that crap.
There's no value in any of that; technology does not age well.
Schools use free stuff or educational products.
And amateurs also free code tools and languages.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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I've been getting back into old systems; Z80, want to do 8085 or 8086, 8051, etc..
I'm a book lover, would love to know what you have.
As far as software I don't know if I could use it or not.
Would be more than willing to pay postage and incidentals.
Give me coffee to change the things I can and wine for those I can not!
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - An updated version available! JaxCoder.com
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I'll make a note of that, Mike. At the moment, I'm staring at VS 2008 Standard edition and VS 2010 Professional edition (Academic) taking up space on my shelf, but there's a ton more. When I get it all into a list, I'll put it up here, or contact you if you have email enabled.
Will Rogers never met me.
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For a long time, i had a Visual C++ installer CD, the 16-bit version. Must be still at home.
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Somewhere around here, I think I still have Visual C++ 1.2. Or was it 1.4? I don't remember, but I still have the Scribble tutorial book that came with it. What a useless scrap of paper... When MS discovered that they have no talent for writing technical manuals, instead of hiring people who can write, they just quit providing documentation. I despise them for that, and always will. A light went out in the Universe when printed knowledge ceased to exist, and MS started it.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger Wright wrote: When MS discovered that they have no talent for writing technical manuals, instead of hiring people who can write, they just quit providing documentation.
Well, the first thing that happened was that the users stopped reading the documentation.
Old memory: I was working in an office landscape then, and heard the guy in the cubicle across the walkway receive a phone call - he was a support guy for the Fortran compiler (it is that long ago!). Obviously I could hear only one side of the conversation- It went like this:
Yes, what is your problem?
I understand ... Do you have a Fortran manual at hand?
Could you open it on page 147?
Good. Will you read out to me the first paragraph on that page?
Oh sure, that's what we are here for, to help you with your problems. Have a good day!
The fun thing is that this support man never picked up his own Fortran manual to find the right page; he took it all from memory.
So all companies stopped writing manuals, more or less. (Some environments never had any - I refuse to call *nix man pages 'technical manuals'). Those companies providing 'something' on paper should be ashamed for calling it 'documentation'. More than 30 years ago, I saved in my scrapbook a comic drawing of a totally broken down man, weeping at the psychiatrists desk. The psychiatrist tries to comfort him: "Having been diagnosed as a dyslectic doesn't mean that you have to give up a writing profession - you can still make a great career in computer documentation!"
Practically speaking, no companies provide good documentation, and hasn't done so for several decades. If you ask for manuals, textbooks, tutorials, they say that they leave that kind of stuff to independent writers and publishing houses. But even those writers usually deliver mediocre quality. One part of it is the readers' expectations: I buy several books that have a very high rating and lots of recommendations on Amazon and other sites, and when I get the book, it proves to be a mess, poorly organized, terribly useless examples, extremely wordy with lots of unnecessary repetitions yet missing essential information, usually with a useless index (sometimes not updated from the previous edition, so the references are all wrong!)
I never had the impression that MS documentation is (/was) any worse than the others. They are all that bad!
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Technical authorship is a highly skilled job, one that developers are hopeless at (and unwilling to do anyway, if they can avoid it). The trouble is that it is the code that purchasers buy, so the first cost to be stripped away by software houses was the quality documentation created by the skilled technical authors, replaced by rubbish "online" documentation provided by reluctant developers. There's a whole generation of users now who have never experienced anything else and know no different. No doubt some claim this is progress!
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haughtonomous wrote: first cost to be stripped away by software houses was the quality documentation created by the skilled technical authors,
So back in the good ol' days it was better right?
When exactly was that? What year?
I remember using a library in the 90s (probably latter half.) Best documentation I had ever seen. That one library. Obviously I had seen other libraries, quite a few, which had miserable documentation. So certainly those did not have those great authors.
In the 80s I learned C++ and OO programming from 3 books. One wasn't even for C++. The C++ compilers, at least two or perhaps three, that I used had virtually no documentation. One of the C++ compilers deliberately did not even match what Stroustrup (one of the books) documented and creator of C++. That 'feature' was not in any of the documentation.
In the 70s the only programming book at all of any sort available to me for Fortran and Pascal were manuals that were chained to an operations desk. Those were not learning tools at all. Just a listing of methods and parameters for each. (In another post today I figured that one of those manuals, in current dollars would have cost about $1000 to buy.)
Today I can probably buy 50 real books, on paper, that cover C++ in various forms.
I can buy at least 10 books, again on paper, that cover Object Oriented Cobol.
To me it certainly seems like there is no lack of documentation now versus way back when.
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Technical authorship is a highly skilled job, one that developers are hopeless at (and unwilling to do anyway, if they can avoid it). The trouble is that it is the code that purchasers buy, so the first cost to be stripped away by software houses was the quality documentation created by the skilled technical authors, replaced by rubbish "online" documentation provided by reluctant developers. There's a whole generation of users now who have never experienced anything else and know no different. No doubt some claim this is progress!
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CD I have for Visual Studio is 1.52c which is for MS-DOS and Windows (no stated version on the CD itself). It has a copyright date on it where the last year is 1995.
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Couldn't have put it better myself. I used to hate the MS hierarchical online documentation tier upon tier of web pages that offered nothing useful other than more links to ever more such pages until one was completely lost. I used to yearn back to the days when I worked on Apollo Domain workstations that came with a stack of thick books that were stuffed with useful and in-depth detail that you could actually read and learn from!
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