NRI Schools and my first book

About this time I received a phone call from someone at NRI Schools, McGraw-Hill Continuing Education Center which was a popular adult education company.  They told me that they were developing a new computer programming course and they wanted to base it on Liberty BASIC.  Wow!

Here's what they wanted to do.  They would write their own course, which would be a staple bound series of books that they would distribute to their students.  They also wanted an actual official Liberty BASIC manual from me for which they would prepay me.

This was to be a perfect bound book with a full color cover.  I had never done such a thing before, so I had a lot to learn.  It was very helpful that they were willing to prepay for the first 1000 copies of the book because otherwise I was not going to be able to bankroll this project.

I decided that the book would be based on the tutorial that came with Liberty BASIC.

This was going to be a lot of work, but it was very exciting!

Bugs Bunny and Raytheon

When we were well along in our project for the Defense Nuclear Agency, a couple of developers from our team were chosen to go to Albuquerque, New Mexico to field test the system.  Part of the system was designed to help provide security by means of motion detection in the desert.

To make this happen we needed to build a custom computer that ran OS/2..  This PC included hardware which could interface with motion detection cameras in order to log motion detection events which included video frames showing what the motion was.  So we were all excited to know that our system was going to take pictures of tumbleweeds and Bugs Bunny in the desert wasteland.  ;-)

Most of the assembly of this custom hardware was done at the Wyman Street, Waltham IBM office where we worked, but Raytheon in Burlington, Mass was responsible for the final integration and shipment to the test grounds in Albuquerque.

So, off to Burlington we went with server in tow.  When you visit Raytheon you have to go in the front door and sign in, and you have to have an appointment with someone who will meet you at the door.  So one of my colleagues and I followed this procedure and found one of our other teammates working on the machine, trying to get OS/2 to start up and load all the drivers properly, but he was having some trouble.

Then a couple other members of our team showed up, but they were unescorted.  So they were asked how they got into the building.  They said rather innocently that they parked in back and as they approached the back door someone came out.  That person held the door for them and they got in without signing in at the front desk!  Uh, oh!  Who was it that let them in?  They didn't know this person, and presumably he went for a walk for took off in his car, so it wasn't going to be easy to figure this out.  They didn't know they were breaking security protocol.  Okay so they went to sign in.

Now we turned out attention to the server again.  We were trying to figure out how to get all the drivers working and we were having some trouble.  This fellow with a clipboard came to us and said that he needed to pack up the computer and put it on the truck to ship it to Albuquerque.  We told him that it wasn't ready, and he walked off.  Some time later he came back again and we told him it still wasn't ready.  Finally he returned and said, "Okay let's ship this thing.  I've got to check this off my list!"  We game him a sharp look and told him firmly "Look buddy, this machine isn't going anywhere until it works.  We will tell you when it's ready."  He did not like this at all, but we really couldn't have cared less.

I guess he thought a non-working computer was good enough for government work.

How to make a RAID array failsafe

The computer that we used to manage the source code for our Defense Nuclear Agency prototype was an IBM System 95 server.  One of the nice features of this system was a three hard drive RAID array.  The special property of this system was that if one of the drives failed, the contents of that drive are recomputed on the fly based on the other two good hard drives.  The drives were hot-swappable, so it was possible to eject the bad drive and replace it with a new one while the system was running.  That drive would then be formatted and it contents rebuilt from the other two drives while the system was in use.  Very cool technology!

One day we decided to reboot the server.  When we did the OS/2 operating system produced an error message on startup saying that one of the drives in the RAID array had failed.  We were shocked.  We should have received an indication of this when the drive actually failed.

So what happened?  These special hot swappable hard drives have an error light that turns on, and also a piezo buzzer that sounds when the drive fails.  The trouble is that the drive failed so completely that the piezo buzzer also failed.  We never heard the audible error sound that we were supposed to hear.  This was a vulnerable moment for us.  If one more of the hard drives were to suffer failure we would have lost work.  We did back up our code periodically to an external cartridge, but it had not been done for weeks.

So clearly IBM had some work to do perfecting their RAID products.  For example, if the piezo buzzers on the other hard disks were designed to sound when any of the other drives failed, this might have proven much more effective.

Liberty BASIC at IBM!

While working on our prototype for the Defense Nuclear Agency I discovered that we needed to reset some files repeatedly whenever we tested and demonstrated the functionality of our system.

I was eager to put Liberty BASIC to good use, and since we were running on OS/2 this gave me an opportunity to create a utility that would make things easy.  Liberty BASIC to the rescue!

It was actually easier to create this utility in BASIC than it would have been in Smalltalk.  Smalltalk is very powerful and really is one of the best languages, but BASIC is stronger for banging out small and simple programs.

I took great pride that when were were demonstrating our system to the customer that they also got a demo of Liberty BASIC in action!

The IBM dress code

Our contracting work at IBM in Waltham was back when IBM had a particular dress code.  All the men had to dress like the agents in the Matrix (without sunglasses).  All the women also needed to wear a lady's business suit.

However since we were not employees we could wear whatever we liked.  The fun part of that is that we got to wear IBM badges which gave access in and out of the building, to the cafeteria, etc.  I got the biggest kick out of this because the IBM employees gave us the strangest looks.  They clearly could not figure out who we were and why we were permitted to dress in casual attire.

IBM Smalltalk and team development

One really great thing about getting the job at Gem Consulting was that we were developing in IBM Smalltalk for OS/2, on IBM computers at IBM.  So we had access to quality support.

My experience using Smalltalk up to this point was using Smalltalk/V which was a popular and very good Smalltalk product.  The IBM Smalltalk was fancier and included GUI drawing tools and source code management, and working with a team of developers (there were four of us) gave me important experience that I never had before.  I learned so much by developing software with others and it taught me to break software down into modules even more effectively than I ever had.

The working space was an audio visual presentation room with an LCD projector that dropped down from the ceiling.  Around the outside of the room were tables where we worked.  We were able to communicate effortlessly because we were in the same space, and when we needed to design or make plans we would all turn our chairs around and use tables in the middle of the room.

Our development of this project went swiftly and smoothly.  I really enjoyed this style of work.

Onward and upward!

In my time at CFC Incorporated I had several interviews for work in Smalltalk.  One of them was in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  They focused a lot on Unix in the interview, or at least that's the way I remember it.  I never got a call back from them.

Another interview was with a company in Waltham called Marble Associates where my friend Laird Popkin worked.  This job seemed fantastic, and the interview was going great.  But when they told me that it was a traveling job which required that I fly to the client every Monday through Thursday I regretfully declined because I was unwilling to be away from my wife and children and also my church community in that fashion.

One day in 1995 I was contacted by one Peter Statterman, and he told me that his company GEM Consulting was looking for an experienced Smalltalk developer for a joint IBM and Raytheon project for the Defense Nuclear Agency of the US military.

We met at a coffee shop in Natick, Massachusetts and he interviewed me.  I must have said something right because he hired me!  It was exciting to be working on a project for IBM on the OS/2 operating system platform.  I was already working on Liberty BASIC for OS/2 and so this gave me the experience I needed to jump right into the project.

GEM Consulting hired me as a subcontractor.  The money was really good, but it was only a three month contract to create a prototype.  If that went well they would extend that to another six month phase.

My intention was to focus on Liberty BASIC when the contract ended and try to launch a full time business.

This was the start of a new chapter in my software development career!

I do own a leather jacket!

Sometimes when a computer breaks the cure can be surprising. We purchased a very expensive software solution for one our engineering tasks. It came with an HP Unix workstation. I never really used this machine. It was a single task appliance and I'm not even sure precisely what it was for. One day however it refused to boot, and I guess we must have stopped paying for support because they called me over to have a look.

Turning the machine on yielded the usual power supply fan noise and nothing else. None of the expected hard drive spinning or seeking was heard. This could be a bad power supply, or it could be a failed hard drive controller, or it could be... sticktion! That is pronounced stick-shun. Yes, really. Look it up. This happens on some hard drives when the hard drive sits powered down for hours or days, and the mirror smooth surface of the hard disk platters get stuck to the magnetic heads which have come to rest on the surface. The coating is just soft enough to stick.

The only way to find out if the problem is sticktion is to open the machine and bang on the hard drive casing to see if the heads can be freed. An ideal tool for this is the plastic handle of a screwdriver.

We opened the computer and I rapped on the hard drive a few times with the butt end of a screwdriver. We turned on the computer and waited... success! I felt just like the Fonz! :-)

Power BASIC and the Uncrashable Kingdom

I had it in mind to use Power BASIC as the compiler to implement the new DOS file server for the factory. This was a new, slicker and rebranded version of Turbo BASIC which I had been using for a while. It wasn't cheap. Power BASIC was a nicely polished compiler and had good documentation. I think we paid $300 or so for it.

I wanted to create a nice UI for the file server so I purchased a windowing library for Power BASIC. It made it easy to create text mode windows using graphics characters. The way it worked was very similar to the way that a Windows programmer would do it in C. You called functions which created windows, buttons, etc. These would return a numeric handle.

Your program would intercept messages from the UI library in an event loop and act on them. Each message would include the handle for the window or widget it was about, and also a value for an action such as a click or a key press. This is not an easy way to write windowing code, but the file server would have a simple enough UI. The end result looked nice and was functional.

I learned a lot on this project. This must have been the highest quality BASIC code I had written to this point. It was a multitasking file server using state machine techniques. Unlike its Xenix based predecessor, this file server never crashed once we had it up and running. Never.

Hacking a file server

No, I'm not talking about hacking an Internet file server. At CFC, Inc. we kept the CNC drilling and routing programs on a file server running Xenix which was a Microsoft branded version of Unix. The CNC machines were plugged directly into this file server using RS-232 ports. Until we purchased this server we had been keeping all our programs on punched paper tape and stored on shelves but now we could keep all this stored electronically.

Okay, this new way of doing things would have been great except that the file server cost lots of money and it wasn't reliable. Every so many weeks or months the computer would crash for one reason or another. When this happened it would run fsck on bootup. This would sometimes find some file system records to repair because the machine didn't have a chance to write everything to disk when it crashed. The end result? We would sometimes lose files from the file server. Bad, bad and worse because all our backups were on tape and we had really bad luck restoring from tape.

We didn't want to spend any more money on this file server. I wanted to develop a replacement in house. It would run on DOS which didn't have the bad habit of delaying writes to the file system. Not bulletproof, but bullet resistant and cheap. But, I had a problem. The only documentation I had which explained the communication protocol for the file server was very thin and hard to understand. I was stuck.

Remember the RS-232 monitor that I grabbed at the GTE auction? I knew right away how useful it would be for this project! Back at the factory I installed this monitor between one of the CNC machines and the Xenix file server. With the ability to see data moving back and forth I was able to figure out how the file server worked. It was tricky because data was actually delivered in packets. There was a non-trivial conversation that happened between these machines but it looked like the code for this was going to be fun to write!

I was ready to get started!

An Auction, an RS-232 monitor and an Apple Lisa

My father called and told me that GTE was auctioning off old equipment. Me and my friend Ray took a break from work in the middle of the day to see if there was anything useful we could use at the factory. There was.

A piece of equipment about the size of a small benchtop oscilloscope caught our attention. It had a 5 inch CRT display, a flat panel keyboard on the front next to the screen and a ribbon cable with a pass-through 25-pin D connector. It was an RS-232 monitor! When I realized what it was I had to have it for a project at work. The idea is that you place this device between devices and it allows you to spy on data that goes back and forth over the serial line. It displayed data in both directions, and you could see it as text or hexadecimal. The price? If I remember correctly I paid $35 for it. Amazing!

I also managed to buy an Apple Lisa computer for $25, but it didn't come with a keyboard. Luckily I noticed the keyboard on a palette of keyboards. I talked to the fellow who won that palette and convinced him that the Lisa keyboard wasn't valuable to him without the computer, and he let me have it.

This was a huge win. I still have the Lisa computer.

Poor Big Bird

No, this isn't a Sesame Street reference! ;-)

One day at CFC the power went out, sort of. Some of the offices had power and some didn't. Maybe a circuit breaker tripped? No, that wasn't it. Like most factories we had 3 phase power. Some parts of the building ran off one phase, and some another. One of the phases went out. This was no big deal for office equipment, but on the factory floor some of the motorized equipment required all 3 phases. If a phase dropped out while a motor was running, it could stall and even burn out. Some of the motors did burn out. Even worse, there was a reflow machine with a steel wire conveyor which ran fiberglass circuitboards through an oven to melt the solder plating to give it a nice shiny finish. The conveyor stopped moving, and the boards caught on fire and filling the factory with a nasty odor. Burning epoxy smells really, really bad.

It took a while to get all this repaired.

Outside on the curb was the cause of all this trouble. A very large bird (maybe a stork?) had decided to take a break. It chose a very dangerous place to sit and met an untimely demise. Up on the utility pole there was a large power transformer which had exploded, and on top of that? A large bird, burnt into a very black cinder, the recipient of that day's Darwin Award!

The Expensive Break Clock

One of our Tandy Model 100 computers had become relegated to controlling the buzzer for indicating shift changes, breaks and lunch. We used the signal for controlling the cassette interface to turn the buzzer on and off. A twenty line BASIC program was used to check the time against a schedule that was hard coded into the program.

Invariably for one reason or another this computer would forget the program. Either Bob or I would then run over and type the program in from memory, set the clock and get it running again. I cannot even count the number of times I did this while I worked there, but it was really no big deal because after a few times it only took a minute.

So here was have this computer which was originally purchased for more than $1000 and we were using it to blow a whistle 8 times a day. Nowaways this would be completely appropriate because you can buy a computer on a chip with all the power of the Model 100 for about $30.

101 Stupid LaserJet Tricks

When I was moved into my new office downstairs, it was located in a space behind what used to be the reception area of the building. The front door was locked from the inside, and visitors would enter a door slightly off to the side and climb stairs to a new reception area.

When anyone visiting would come back down those stairs they would sometimes forget that they came through the side door. Instead they would go out the original glass door, which was an inner door and an outer door. The first door had a lever you pushed to unlatch and open the door. This was locked so that if you passed through this door you couldn't come back in. Once through this door there was another door right there. This had a locked bolt, but you could just unlock the bolt and get out, and invariably this is what people did.

Then I had this idea for a prank. Using the LaserJet printer I printed in great big letters READ THIS. Then below in a tiny 4 point font I printed "If you can read this then you are trapped!" I drew an arrow from the large words to the tiny words by hand. I hung this on the wall between the two glass doors.

Weeks later I was in my office working and I heard some banging and the sound of someone calling out. I went out to find out what was going on. Shock and amazement overcame me when I saw this fellow between the glass doors, banging with his fist and calling for help! He had read the sign and believed it! I laughed and opened the inner door for him and explained that he really wasn't trapped at all. So I showed him how to unlock the bolted outer door. Unfortunately he didn't think this was funny at all. He didn't smile or laugh but he just left without saying a word. Perhaps he was humiliated that he had fallen for the trap?

I was very pleased to see that someone had read the sign and believed it. This was absolutely priceless. Looking back at this prank I should count myself lucky that I didn't get in trouble.

Our First Laser Printer

We decided to purchase a laser printer so we could print bill of materials sheets for each job. I managed to find a used HP LaserJet cheap. This was the original LaserJet printer model and had only 128K of RAM. This was fine, except if you wanted to print graphics. You could not even draw a half page of black and white graphics with 128K. This also meant that there was very little room to load fonts into the printer. The saving grace was that there was a font cartridge slot. I bought one of those super font cartridges that had lots of fonts. It turns out that we really only needed one font. I don't remember which one we used, but it was a small monospaced font.

The printer had a serial port, not a Centronics printer port. Normally this would have been considered a limitation, but this was perfect for our shop floor control system which I was building around Arnet multiport RS-232 cards.

I needed to learn just a little bit of Hewlett Packard's PCL (printer control language) to make the LaserJet do its thing. I wrote some code in Smalltalk to drive the printer. Depending on how complex the board design was, these bills of materials sometimes had a lot of information on them. It was somehow very satisfying to produce software that would drive a printer elsewhere in the building. I had never done that before.

The printer was located up in the engineering department, and after they designed a circuitboard for an order they would fill in some fields into the shop floor control system and print out the bill of materials on the LaserJet.

Little Guatemala

Most of the employees at C.F.C. were from below the Texas border. I don't remember ever there being anyone from Mexico, but there probably was. There were people from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Ecuador and the Carribean islands like Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. You name it. There seemed to be more people from Guatemala than from anywhere else. We liked to joke that we were going to fly the flag of Guatemala over the building and declare C.F.C. a sovereign nation, Little Guatemala.

The Fastest Computer in the World - CompuAdd

I invited Bob to my office to show him what I had done with the tracking system idea and I demoed the Smalltalk/V prototype I had written. I showed him what it could do and I explained that we could attach many terminals to it. This went over very well. I told him that in order to do this well we would need a copy of Smalltalk/V 286, which was a more powerful version of Smalltalk/V that could access up to 16MB of RAM. This was $199. We would also need a computer more powerful than anything we had in the factory at that time, and we would need to purchase at least one multiport RS-232 card to get started.

Bob agreed to all this. On top of that he was willing to go all out. The company usually quoted as having the fastest PC clones at that time was Compaq with their DeskPro systems. Bill Machrone from PC Magazine was famous (in my own mind at least) for having said that the DeskPro/20 ran its startup tests so fast that it made him giggle.


But the king of the hill at the time I went looking for a speed demon for our shop floor system was made by CompuAdd. In the reviews I read, the CompuAdd 386/25 was a terrific performer for the budget price of only $6100. Then we needed to add 4MB of RAM for about another $2000, and I'm pretty sure the multiport card was about $900. He agreed to buy this equipment. Wow. Just, wow.

My office wasn't the best place for this machine, so they moved me downstairs into a more central location. The office they gave me was spacious with a very large window. This was great except sometimes the window leaked when it rained. Our facilities manager Joe (yes that was his real name) helped me run some serial cables, and I soldered the 25 pin D connectors onto each end. RS-232 is only designed for 50 foot cable lengths. We needed longer runs than 50 foot. I had to source special low capacitance cable so that we could run cables of 100 foot or more. I needed to short across handshaking lines to make them work, and I made a null modem adapter for each one. I found a supplier in Framingham called Marcus Associates where we bought some used ADM-5 terminals, which were much newer and nicer than the ADM-3A I had prototyped the system on.

Before long we had a working system with terminals in different departments, and a printer for reports. I created a simulated terminal window for the computer itself so I could test the system without consuming a valuable serial port in my office.

This was the beginning of what was an exciting and productive project, even with some very challenging hurdles to overcome.

My Skunk Works Project

What is a skunk works? A definition from Wikipedia: The designation "skunk works", or "skunkworks", is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.

In order to prototype the multiuser shop floor control system, I needed a real video terminal. The idea would be to take a computer and install one or more multiport RS-232 cards and connect terminals to them from all over the building.

The following work was done more or less under the radar. I wasn't trying to get away with anything, but I hoped to surprise Bob with the results I hoped to achieve. I managed to requisition an old Lear Sieglar ADM-3A terminal on the cheap. This was one of those pastel blue terminals with a "space age bubble" look to it. Needham High School had a few of these connected up to their PDP-11.

In order to make this work with Smalltalk/V I needed a tiny machine code routine so I could make calls to the serial port. I was lucky to find someone on a bulletin board who was kind enough to write this for me. I was even luckier that it worked! The machine code file was only 14 bytes long!

It didn't take me very long at all to create a master monitor, a login routine, a simple command parser, a simple job object, departments that could hold jobs, and the ability to move the work from one department to another and list the contents of each department.

What was absolutely most amazing about what Smalltalk/V made possible is that the system was extensible and debuggable... as it ran! If there was a runtime error while executing some command from the terminal, a debugger opened on the computer screen. I could then fix the bug right there, and the terminal could be restarted without bringing the system down for a recompile.

This was very promising to say the least.

Christmas Vacation

I didn't take the plunge into Smalltalk right away. I wasn't completely sure it was the right choice. I was at the SoftPro store in Burlington in late 1988 and I noticed that they had a copy of the Smalltalk/V software from Digitalk. I asked them if they had any brochures, and they did. Three different full color, double sided marketing sheets. Very nicely done. Everything I saw about the language reminded me of Forth, but it had this idea of objects.

I wasn't about to ask my boss to buy yet another programming tool, so in December I bought it myself. I took the Tandy 1000SX home from work over Christmas vacation and dove into the Smalltalk/V manual, following the tutorial.

I was not disappointed. What an amazing language! I had never used anything so dynamic, or so graphical. Almost all the source code for each and every thing in Smalltalk is there. You can see it and you can modify it if you like. This was very compatible with my observation that Smalltalk and Forth were conceptually similar. The one surprise that really topped off this sundae with a cherry? Smalltalk has built-in multiprocessing. This was the ingredient that I sorely needed to produce the multiuser shop floor control system! What luck!

From Actor to the Real Thing

I decided that I needed more information about the Actor programming language. While at The Bit Bucket one day I asked Laird if he could get me some literature about Actor, figuring the store could place an order for me. He gladly accepted my request.

A few weeks later Laird had the materials in hand and he presented them to me. Then he said something that would completely change everything. He asked me, "Why don't you have a look at Smalltalk?" He told me that Smalltalk was the real deal.

This was not the first time I had heard of Smalltalk. At the New England Mobile Book Fair I had seen a book about it. I ran back to my office and started digging through issues of BYTE until I found an ad for something called Smalltalk/V.

I had seen this sort of ad before, but I just skimmed over it thinking it was a kind of communications program of the sort used with modems. There was at this time a very popular application of this kind named Crosstalk XVI, and this was the source of my confusion.

The ad seemed very interesting. I began to research Smalltalk. I learned that there was an August 1981 issue of BYTE dedicated to exploring Smalltalk. I went to the Boston Public Library and xeroxed all the articles from that issue. It cost me about $40 to do this. So I began to educate myself about Smalltalk.

What's a Popkin?

Well, the question really is "Who is Laird Popkin?" Good question.

In the summer of 1988 I met Laird Popkin when he was working at The Bit Bucket in West Newton. The Bit Bucket was this cool store with cool people and with cool stuff in the windows, like Amiga computers showing ray traced animations with shiny chrome balls and also a PDP-8. Try to find one of those on ebay!

Now, Laird was this nice fellow a couple of years older than me. He gave me my first ever demonstration of Windows 2.1. He showed me how an Atari ST could run Mac software if you ripped the contents of a Mac ROM. He introduced me to bulletin boards and FidoNet, and emoticons! He even invited me to his place in Sudbury (or was it in Weston?) where he shared a house with a bunch of other techies and their Apple II's and a Jaguar motoring enthusiast. He loaned me his copy of The Eudamonic Pie, which is this fascinating book about how some west coast nerds invented a computer in a shoe for beating roulette. Eat your heart out Maxwell Smart! I still have the book. Sorry Laird.

Laird and I had lunch a few times and struck up some great conversations. We talked about computers, science, consciousness and God.

Wherever you are Laird, thank you!

Welcome to My Research and Development Lab

In search of the perfect next development tool to create our shop floor control system I was now in full blown research and development mode. I would read lots of magazines looking to learn as much as I could. I had a modem and a phone line in my office now too, and I was downloading free programming tools and trying them out.

Bob allowed me to take off and go to the public library so that I could read magazines articles about languages and programming. There were plenty of articles about object oriented extensions to languages like C and Forth. I found all this very interesting, but I had no experience with object oriented programming so I really didn't know what to think.

I saw an ad in a magazine for a language called Actor by the Whitewater Group, and this really caught my attention. The code looked like C, but it was supposed to be object oriented. There was a code snippet in a screenshot in the ad that implemented a very simple drawing program. The code was just a few lines long. The screenshot also showed the simple drawing program and they used it to draw a version of the product logo. The idea was that you could create very sophisticated software with very little code. The only thing was that the software was not cheap, and it required a copy of Microsoft Windows 2.1. We weren't yet running Windows on any computer in our office. This was in the summer of 1988.

One other tool I was interested in was called Matrix Layout. This was a visual flowcharting tool that produced graphical DOS applications. I guess you could call it a kind of HyperCard, which is a Macintosh programming tool for end users. It was only $149 so I obtained a copy for myself. The developer's office was in Boston, so I just drove there one day after work and bought it at the receptionist's desk. I was ultimately quite disappointed by this product. I tried to prototype a version of the video rental application I wrote in BASIC, but it was too much effort for the result. Once you've used a real programming language, these visual tools for non-programmers feel very limited. Clarion is really a lot better because it has a real programming language you can use to script extensions beyond the visual layout tools. Matrix Layout did not provide any way to write scripts. A simple BASIC interpreter would have done great things for this tool.

Then there was Ashton Tate's Framework. This was a fascinating programming system where modules of your application are in a frame, which can hold more frames, and these can hold yet more frames, etc. It had a scripting language called FRED which was based on a Lisp, a very powerful language. Framework was an integrated office suite, and it was extensible using the frame concept and the the scripting language. I never actually got to try it out, but I'm not sure it would have been suitable for the shop floor control system I wanted to develop anyways.

If Bob was beginning to wonder about whether I was ever going to produce anything for all the time and money spent, I never knew it. He was very patient. I did manage to stay busy with smaller projects. He had lots of ideas to enhance the applications I had already written, and he would come to me and we would talk about what he would like.

Thinking Forth

I wrote some small programs in C, and I was having a good time doing that.  However, my ambition was to write a shop floor control system and I started work on that using C.  I found that C was manageable for small programming tasks. As the project got larger dealing with all the pointer arithmetic, manual memory management and casting of numeric types was beginning to drive me nuts.  I had to conclude that C is a really good language for operating system work because it was designed for that, but that for application level work it just shouldn't be necessary to be concerned with bits, bytes, pointers, memory allocation etc.  Heck, BASIC would have been a better language than C for this.

After my disappointing experience with Wendin DOS and C I decided that I needed a more expressive programming language. I started to dabble in different languages, and I would write toy shop floor control systems to see how the code would come together. My work was exploratory in the sense that I wasn't in a big hurry to produce a result. I felt that I didn't know which course to take. In particular, I didn't know how to code a solution to overcome the hurdle of multitasking.

For example I experimented with a 4GL called Clarion. Bob was willing to spend several hundred dollars on this based on some stellar reviews that it received in magazines. Clarion really was great, but it was oriented primarily as a development tool for forms based database apps, and it had a nice reports engine. It did also include a compiler for BASIC-like language, but this was a short lived experiment. I do seem to remember creating a custom app for accounting with Clarion so we did get some value for the money.

So after this my mind turned back to the Forth programming language. I had already some experience with it, and I was excited to see if I could use it to create a multiuser shop floor system.

I found a version of Forth called Fifth, which included a simple IDE for MS-DOS. I also played with a couple of other Forth implementations.

So I went looking and bought a book titled Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie, the same author of the wonderful Starting Forth book I encountered a few years earlier. This was the most inspiring book about programming I had read yet. I enjoyed Leo's explanations about how software needs to be written abstractly, that code should be as small and simple as possible, about the importance of choosing the best words for procedures and variables, and also how to write well factored code and what that really means. The book also has great interviews with experienced Forth programmers and many funny and illustrative cartoons. Great stuff. Now, where did I put my copy?

Books I didn't buy

Before there were big book stores like Borders or Barnes & Noble there was The New England Mobile book fair in Newton. This could hardly be considered walking distance from my home growing up in Needham, but I had made the trip on foot a couple of times as a kid with my brother Ernie. Now I made the trip more frequently since I had a car.

This store was really just a big warehouse, poorly lit, and not very well organized. However this was the largest collection of books for sale to be had for miles.

I remember clearly two books that I browsed there that I didn't buy but which left an impression on me.

One was called A Small C Compiler, by James Hendrix. Not the famous musician, of course. ;-) I read just enough of the book to appreciate its biggest idea. Once you write enough of a C compiler in assembly language, you can use that C compiler to write itself! Like I said I didn't buy the book, but I learned important ideas from just browsing through it.

Another book was call Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation. This was a tan and blue hardcover. I can't say I really understood at that time what I was looking at, but it was interesting enough that I didn't forget it. In more recent years I did find a copy of it used and now am a proud owner. Smalltalk is a terrific language this book explains in wonderful detail how it works. Nowadays the entire contents of this book can be read for free online.

Moving to Belmont

About this time I moved to Belmont with my brother Paul and his little daughter Christina, and also a friend of ours from our church named Stuart Harrington. Belmont is a very nice little town between next to Waltham where I worked, so I had a 15 minute commute. What a great place to live. Drive 15 minutes one way and you're in Boston. Drive the other direction and you're in Lincoln. I really enjoyed that.

Eventually Stuart got married and moved out and we were joined by another friend from church named Paul Ward. Paul was a sonar operator in a fast attack sub when he served in the Navy. He told interesting stories. We decided to share a room. We bought a steel tubular framed bunk cot. I would get up early in the morning and help him deliver newpapers in Lexington. I had inherited one of the Osborne 1 computers from work which Paul and I would spend some time tinkering with and banging out simple BASIC programs. My memory is a bit foggy, but I seem to remember giving the computer to Paul.

I thought I might be able to purchase a new computer for myself now that I had a regular paying job. I was interested in practicing my C programming and Radio Shack had a nice little portable called the Tandy Model 600. I read somewhere that CP/M and a C compiler could be had for this little machine and I thought this would be a very neat computer to own. When they were getting ready to discontinue this model the price dropped well below a thousand dollars. However I wasn't very good at saving money.

I never did purchase a Model 600. Just as well because I think I would have outgrown it very quickly.