Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Ziff Davis Interactive, Liberty BASIC, and Bill Gates

Robert Gerami, a close friend of mine worked for Ziff Davis (the owner of PC Magazine) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He was in charge of their free downloadable utilities.  They were particularly well known for their whimsical screensavers, including one where a cartoon of Bill Gates would smash your Windows 3 desktop to reveal a shiny new Windows 95 desktop which would then be eaten by bugs before your eyes.

Robert liked what he saw in Liberty BASIC and decided to offer me a chance to have it featured on their web site as a special edition.  But, before he was willing to do this he want it to support making API calls.

The best part of this arrangement was that Ziff Davis would pay me to do the development, and that the resulting work would still be owned by me.

This is one of the important features of what became Liberty BASIC v2.0.  This was promoted by Ziff Davis Interactive on their website for several years.

Thursday, January 21, 2016

DOOM and the raiders of the lost hours

My first PC compatible computer ran DOS and Windows, and OS/2 and... DOOM.

In between rounds of development work on Liberty BASIC I would take breaks playing DOOM.  By today's standards this is a crude looking game, but back then it was really groundbreaking.  Playing it in a dark room was a good way to scare yourself half to death.  Today I would surely consider it rather tame.  The only thing that really compared to it was a game called Ultima Underworld which was actually a smoother and more detailed real-time 3D game.

In the world of PC gaming it really was all DOS.  Running Windows or OS/2 sucked up too many resources from what was typically a 33MHz 80486 computer.  The game would not play well.  Even when running DOS you needed to use HIMEM and play all the tricks in the book for there to be enough memory.

Other games that wasted my time included Falcon 3.0 which is probably the perfect air combat simulator and a cool game called Theatre of War which was sort of a real time version of Chess, kinda.

Friday, January 15, 2016

When a bad sector error is not a drive problem

When I was working on my book for NRI Schools I was having a lot of bad sector errors and cross linked sector errors on my computer.  Stuff like that.  Every day.

I even continued to get these after I upgraded my hard drive so I began to smell a rat.  My 32MB of RAM tested good so it wasn't that.  If the processor cache RAM was bad this should also cause the main RAM test to fail, unless the algorithm for the memory test is too naive.  I decided to replace the cache RAM chips on my motherboard anyways.  I think this was 128K of chips in eight sockets on my motherboard.  I don't remember how much this was, but I don't think it was very expensive.

I'm sure I got the RAM chips from Metrowest Computers in Framingham, Massachusetts because that's where I bought the computer from.  I tore the machine down.  I was very careful not to static out anything.  Inserting those little DIP chips with their little legs requires some care or they get bent!

Got it all back together and crossed my fingers as I booted it up successfully.  :-)

I never got another sector error.  Mission accomplished.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

Murphy's Law of book publishing

Once the book was all proofed and the camera ready art produced, and once I had the color separation for the cover all produced I was ready to order the first run of books which was approximately 1000 copies.

NRI Schools sent me a check in advance for these books.  How can you beat that?  So I sent everything off to Whitehall Publishing and waited nervously.

A couple of weeks later several heavy boxes arrived.  So exciting!

I cracked open one of the boxes and grabbed one of the fresh books.  What a neat thing to hold the result of so much work in my hands.  This really looked just like a book that you would buy at the store.

And then... I opened the book to the first page and my heart sank.  The very page had a spelling mistake.  I misspelled the word congratulations.  :-/

It read Congradulations.   What?  How could I miss that?

Ah well, it was still a great day!  :-)

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Liberty BASIC book preproduction

In addition to actually writing the Liberty BASIC book which involved developing the tutorial examples and explaining them, creating a quiz for each chapter, developing and proofreading each chapter, etc. There was the matter of producing camera ready pages.  They needed to be a certain size and they wanted crop marks on the pages.

NRI Schools also wanted a full color color, which I really didn't know how to create.  A friend of mine named Robert Gerami actually helped me with the graphic, and he even added a funny cartoon to the back of the book.  The cartoon was of a building with a sign saying "Programming School" and there was a hot dog stand outside the building.  A character with a fishing rod up on the second floor was trying to snatch a hot dog from the vendor's stand with his fish hook!  It was a humorous way to polish off the book's cover design.

There was a local company that created the acetate color separations for the cover, and all this went off to a company called Whitehall Publishing.  They charged me approximately $6 for each copy of the book when ordered in 1,000 or more.

All I needed to do now was write the check and wait...

Friday, January 8, 2016

Writing a book was more than I bargained for

I really had no idea how much work this was going to be.  I had good starting material with the Liberty BASIC tutorial, which had actually been fashioned into a spiral bound book which I produced at the local Staples store, but this had to be more polished.

I had no serious word processing software.  This meant that I needed to use the Write application that came with Microsoft Windows.  The only strengths that this provided was that it was essentially free, it was easy to understand and didn't burden me with any strange gotchas that full blown word processors often do, and it allowed page footers.

This was hard work.  The process was to produce a draft of a chapter, print it out and then I would lay down on the carpet with a pencil and read it, marking it up as I went.  Then I would go back and enter in all my changes and repeat the process several times until that chapter seemed good enough for the book.

This took weeks.  By the time I was done, I was determined to never, ever do it again.  Of course this didn't end up being my last book.  :-/

Thursday, January 7, 2016

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!

Sunday, January 3, 2016

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.


Friday, January 1, 2016

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.