Comprehensive Computing (1990's and my meeting the Acorn A3000)

When I went to comprehensive they had BBC Micro's... I had an Atari ST at home... the school then upgraded to Acorn A3000's.  Now the ST, Acorn and IBM PC used very nearly the exact same floppy format (there was one byte difference between the ST and the PC basically, and nothing with the Acorn Archimedes series)....

The teachers, totally no idea how to use these machines.  Sure they could run applications in pre-packaged orders, but they never delved into them.  The Acorn had a whole host of built-in software, the OS itself came with a RAM disk, one teacher once saw me cache all my work on a 1MB RAM disk and work hundreds of times faster than anyone else in the lab, but they had NO idea how I did it; and didn't want me to explain it to them.

So they often found me in the lab... despite it being locked...

You could get in via two routes, one was to go in through the neighbouring classrooms air vent between the two back-to-back store cupboards... One day I found the grill had been screwed back in place and sealed, which put a stop to that... And no matter how often I asked teachers would NOT let us into the lab without themselves being present, and quite simply they didn't have the will to help encourage learning, it was a dangerous prescient for them in the 90's to admit that there were those with a natural talent in a field the staff had no interest nor experience in.

So what next?  Well we had to climb out the window, shimmy along the ledge and climb back in... Usually only one person did this and then unlocked the door for the others, but it was a bit hairy on windy winter days.

 But literally, the school didn't want the kids to use the computers, either scared we'd break them, or more likely we'd steal them, ever seen the size of an A3000 and the bespoke monitor?  yeah, I can really not imagine how they thought we'd sneak them out the building unnoticed.

Anyway, one day, I'm there with some code in the RAM Disk, playing about with the Basic interpreter and I had a new thing called a "Compiler"... I think it was for Pascal, but it's lost to memory.... The door unlocked and a teacher pounces in Alan Partridge style... "A haaa, I caught you"....

Yes sir, you caught me.... trying to better myself, please put me in irons and take me away.  Basically, I can only assume; after the fact; that in this school we're all meant to be preparing ourselves as manual labour, I know!   (Top Valley Comprehensive, represent; it's now "Top Valley Academy" or even just part of Red Hill Academy, because you know... We're not allowed our little tribal enclaves anymore).

But this teacher takes a look at I'm doing; I would hazard a guess he expected a game instead he see's code and the dozens and dozens of disks I have, "Come with me, I know what punishment you must receive".... Bit worrying, but we trusted everyone back then, and I followed him to the store cupboard.

And he slaps a brand new unopened packet of 10 disks into my hands then rummaged in a plastic disk box for another grubby one with tippex all over the paper label, which is so tatty it must have been reused until the plastic platter inside was an atom thick.

"Right, I need 10 copies of this disk by tomorrow, else you're in front of the head master"

In hindsight I should have said "Can I go talk to the headmaster about your not encouraging me to learn and explore the machines which are taking over our daily lives".... But alas I said "yes Sir"

I didn't even think about the format issue, I just went home and made an exact sector by sector duplicate on my ST, assuming it was either an Acorn or PC compatible bunch of data, I couldn't tell until the morning, but I made a copy for myself too.

Arriving back I handed him the box.... His stunned face was quite a thing to behold, I think he expected it to take a long time... But I got two drives, yeah baby, rocking the power set up!

But during break, and after scaling the building again, I popped one of the disks into a drive and let it boot....

Lemmings... For the Acorn A3000 series, it was ported by some other company, it wasn't the DMA/Psygnosis original, I kind of remember it being some butterfly logo in purple... But it was lemmings... And I'd made eleven pirate copies of it as "Punishment".

Pretty sure the wrong was all on the other side.

I did get permission from one of the deputy heads to use the computers from time to time, but by the time I finished at comprehensive I was learning Pascal for my ST, and even writing and released my first program as a kill counter/leader board for Elite II Frontier; that was the first piece of software to earn me some money (£25 one weekend, with five sales) so I was hooked; no thanks to any part of my education experience at comprehensive level.

Warhol's Amiga & Camoflage

Two Interesting pieces of obscure computer history came to light via the BBC today, one of which I'm amazed to see I'd already watched and contacted people about.

This video...

About the history of the development of the Amiga, I'd watched about a year ago, and I contacted R J Mical about whether he had any more of his talks video's and could upload them.  He even contacted me back asking about USB connectivity from video recorders - sorry R J I'm in the UK and was unable to help.

But then this article appeared today on the BBC, quite obviously they're talking about the Amiga Launch video which is tacked onto the end of the Amiga History video I had watched, in the above video skip to the 58th minute.

Warhol's Amiga on the BBC

It's interesting to see the PIC format described as un-readable, I can read it on my Atari ST's... If they'd have asked, I could have opened the format, converted it to 256bit BMP and re-saved it in about 15 minutes...

The other computing Gem was this article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-26820227

Specifically the reference to Chris having created the  first every Computer Promo for a Music single, which has been uploaded to YouTube for a few years now, but which did have me very interested:

I'm surprised with it appearing on the BBC it still only has around 10,000 views though.

Pascal Programming on the Atari ST

Here's a strange feeling... I have the feeling that I've just done something unique for the day today... I think no-one else on this planet was coding Pascal on an Atari ST today... But I was...

I watched a video where by one of the tenants to meet in order to consider yourself a programmer was to know five languages fluently (that's computer programming languages folks, not GCSE French or German).

My considerations for my five languages are C++ (and therefore C), C#, Java, Pascal and Perl.  The latter I'm fairly rusty on, I only did one major task on it and that was a while back, so I'm going to have a look back later.  The C family and Java I use all the time... So this left Pascal.

I always put Pascal down, its on my CV, its one of the first languages I ever learned, its certainly the first language I actually coded and put through a compiler and linker (rather than just interpreting), I learned it in Turbo Pascal for DOS and my first job after leaving university was to work in Delphi (a derivative of Pascal) coaxing some legacy systems of my employer from Delphi to Borland C++ Builder standard code.

But that was a LONG time ago.  Over a decade.  So I took a step back and looked around for a copy of Turbo Pascal (I own one so it was around somewhere) but all I found was a broken zip file and a few 16bit applications I could not run on any of my current machines.  My old Laptop (the one my brother had stolen in a house burglary about eight years ago) had it all on it, so its gone... What Pascal/emulator/virtual machine do I have which I can work and reference and remember?  And you'll never believe where I ended up.

I ended up with an Atari ST emulator and making an image of the ST Format cover disk with Personal Pascal upon it.

My first task was to extract the Cover Disk LZH file - which took oh sooooo long.

Then I set up my desktop and got used to the interface again.  I love my Atari ST, I have the real machine under my desk and software still hanging around.

So, I'm using Hatari, compiled under gcc running on ubuntu for this work...

The challenge I had then was to pick something to actually do, I chose a simple application I have on the back burner for an item on GetACoder which I've bid on, and started to port the code from C# to Pascal...

The first thing I realized was how little infrastructure, or helpful, code there is in Pascal, you have to declare everything procedurally, my brain is very much object orientated.  So thinking procedurally rewired a whole bunch of connections in my brain... Then I had to remember how to use pointers in Pascal... I remember fighting with this before (when I was 16) but now, with years more experience I breezed through the logic and the allocation and disposal of resources.

The application was back together pretty quickly... except... I had a couple of bugs, the first bug I had was that in the iterator passing down the linked list of integers at each row in the code it was not referencing the correct "next" pointer.  So I had an infinite loop... doh.

But, oh my god, what a ball ache to debug it.  There is no debugger in this free Pascal compiler/linker, so debugging I was reduced to the level of primitives...

Putting in writeln statements looking where the code went wrong, instead of calculating values on the fly I was having to declare variables for them write them out to the screen and check their value visually as I let the program move between readln statements... Utter total ball ache.

But in the end the program was running...

(Don't worry about the negative values, thats just the 16bit integers rolling over a lot earlier than they do in my 32bit implementation).

The code, I'll post another day for you folks to enjoy... But this little foray into ST nostalgia did one of two things... firstly, finding these bugs in the code made me become very intent on the software as it left my fingers, far more intent on making sure its correct than I am with modern systems - where a quick compile helps find what's going wrong where - in the ST to compile this trivial code was a lengthy operation - taking up to a minute to compile and link alone - this changed my approach to the code, I was attentive, nurturing and double checking at each step making sure the logic was perfect that simple typo's and spelling mistakes were not made... I missed code complete terribly, but this lack of functionality pressed me to be a better programmer.  I had to remember what I was doing, where and when, I also have to think about the names of the functions and procedures I was laying down and remember their names, names which I had made meaningful.

All in all, to this point the coding has been a successful exercise.  Helping me refresh my knowledge and count my blessings working as a developer today.  On some levels I miss this kind of coding, closer to the machine, down near the bare metal, but in many more respects I thank progress for the innovations of modern development environments.

The absolute weakest thing about the code I produced on the ST however was that, because editing was such a chore, because there is only limited memory (1 megabyte) and that to have to strip the code down for compilation comments would take extra memory space, I simply ceased commenting my code.  I suddenly understand how frustrating some of the code problems I dealt with as a Millennium Prep manager really must have been for the folks I kept whipping into a frenzy.