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.
Showing posts with label CGA graphics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CGA graphics. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Mousing Around
Since my Tandy 1000SX had high resolution graphics (if you could call monochrome CGA 640x200 high resolution) we thought it made sense to get a mouse and learn to program with it. Then we might be able to write even better software for the engineers to use when setting up each circuitboard for production. We had a crude graphical CNC simulator that ran on the Kaypro machines, so this could be a step forward for us with more detailed graphics and a mouse for a pointing device.
We bought the mouse at Radio Shack. It was a pretty nice little mouse, and it came with its own interface card like most mice did back then. I'm guessing that this mouse was made by the same people who made the the famous Microsoft Mouse. It was very similar. All the mice at that time had a ball for tracking movement, and this one was a metal ball with a rubber coating.
I believe that my first experiments with the mouse were in Turbo BASIC. There were no built in commands for the mouse. I don't remember exactly how the mouse was read either, but I remember there was documentation. Playing around with some code for drawing on the screen with the mouse inspired me to write an experimental character recognizer. I would draw letters on the screen and the program would attempt to convert them to ASCII characters. It really wasn't that hard to do, but prototypes don't have to be practical. It was fun.
We bought the mouse at Radio Shack. It was a pretty nice little mouse, and it came with its own interface card like most mice did back then. I'm guessing that this mouse was made by the same people who made the the famous Microsoft Mouse. It was very similar. All the mice at that time had a ball for tracking movement, and this one was a metal ball with a rubber coating.
I believe that my first experiments with the mouse were in Turbo BASIC. There were no built in commands for the mouse. I don't remember exactly how the mouse was read either, but I remember there was documentation. Playing around with some code for drawing on the screen with the mouse inspired me to write an experimental character recognizer. I would draw letters on the screen and the program would attempt to convert them to ASCII characters. It really wasn't that hard to do, but prototypes don't have to be practical. It was fun.
Monday, February 22, 2010
The Job Does Has Its Perks
When I got promoted to computer programmer they moved me out of the engineering area and into the room next to it. They also gave me a desk and bought me a computer. This was a Tandy 1000SX, sporting a 7.16MHz 8088 processor, 384K bytes of RAM, two floppy drives and a 20MB hard card (a hard drive that is mounted on a frame in line with the controller card).
This was a slightly quirky machine. Tandy was used to producing their own designs, and their IBM PC clones up to this point were attempts at going their own way. As every computer manufacturer was learning it really didn't work to make an almost IBM compatible computer. The 1000 series was their first really compatible line. Even so they stubbornly kept their own keyboard layout from the Tandy 2000. I even needed to draw some missing symbols on keys with a permanent marker. The printer port was just circuitboard fingers on the motherboard instead of the popular Centronics printer connector.
The machine had CGA graphics and a green screen monitor. This would prove to be very important to software I would write but I couldn't imagine at this time where this would lead.
This was a slightly quirky machine. Tandy was used to producing their own designs, and their IBM PC clones up to this point were attempts at going their own way. As every computer manufacturer was learning it really didn't work to make an almost IBM compatible computer. The 1000 series was their first really compatible line. Even so they stubbornly kept their own keyboard layout from the Tandy 2000. I even needed to draw some missing symbols on keys with a permanent marker. The printer port was just circuitboard fingers on the motherboard instead of the popular Centronics printer connector.
The machine had CGA graphics and a green screen monitor. This would prove to be very important to software I would write but I couldn't imagine at this time where this would lead.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
