Viewing profile — jim_lawless

Agreed. I only recently found out about a book that Barden wrote (also a Sams book) that was published in 1977 called "How to Program Microcomputers". It explains the common workin…

Z-80 was the processor for my introduction to programming in assembly language on a TRS-80 model I in early 1983. Bill Barden's assembly language books and Hardin Brothers' "The Ne…

I've stood up a message board to try to recapture the fun of running an 80's/90's BBS. You can look around at : https://jims-bbs.com/bbs/ If you want to join in and post, you'll ne…

I remember seeing the TRS-80's in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou but I didn't know that they were Model IV's. According to this list, there was a TRS-80 Model III in the Star W…

It looks like MiniScript uses the keyword "end" followed by another keyword to denote the end of a specific type of block. From the Quick Reference guide here: https://miniscript.o…

You might want to check out the book "FoxTales : Behind the Scenes at Fox Software" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005KUH4GI

Related HN post "Ageless Linux- Software for humans of indeterminate age" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47381791

My main page is https://jimlawless.net/ It mainly serves as a page to hold contact info and some links to various specific parts of my sites ( blogs, podcast, ...etc. )

I saw a post about the SKOAR language here on HN in late 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10180423 In the comments, I saw reference to MML ( Music Macro Language ... not …

I interviewed Rob Sherman the gent behind Southernamis and other Atari BBS's on my podcast a few months ago. He's running emulated Atari 8-bit systems in AWS for these BBS's. Rob a…

I asked ChatGPT to write a Windows GUI C program that looks for a running instance of the onedrive EXE at regular intervals and terminates it while keeping a running log of the att…

I have a handful of sites that I visit frequently. I wrote a script called "to" that has an embedded list of these sites' URL's along with some metadata that includes the preferred…

You could do similar things on a C64 and other computers. You might try this out on a C64 emulator such as VICE. 10 REM NOTHING TO SEE HERE 20 PRINT "HELLO!" POKE 2049,1 Run it. Yo…

There was a pretty detailed article in the May 1985 Radio Electronics that mentioned interfacing it to a VIC-20: https://archive.org/details/radio_electronics_1985-05/page/n... Tra…

A TCL interpreter is packaged with Python in the tkinter library: import tkinter tcl=tkinter.Tcl() tcl.eval('puts "Hello, world!"')

Nope. Not me.

This reminds me of home computing in the late 70's when we used to keep our "database" info in DATA statements embedded in a given BASIC program. https://jimlawless.net/images/basi…

In the early 1990's, I purchased a "Telepath" modem from a company then known as Gateway 2000 along with a computer and other gear. Qmodem for DOS was included with the Telepath. I…

Forth has a default syntax, but Forth code can execute during the compilation process allowing it to accept/compile custom syntaxes.

I like to write a lot of little programming interpreters and compilers that don't have a whole lot of purpose other than to experiment with a concept. One of these was a little lan…

80 Micro was a wonderful magazine. Hardin Brothers' column "The Next Step" ... a Z-80 assembly language tutorial series ... was my favorite portion of the magazine.

At the time of the release of Turbo Pascal 3.x, the IDE's on the CP/M version and MS-DOS version were almost identical. I suspect that the author was using TP 4.x or later on MS-DO…

A set of Python PIL scripts for generating background / wallpaper montages. One of the output montages is here : https://jimlawless.net/magsbooks.jpg A Perl script that formats a b…

I'd read a story a while back about a phone company employee who serviced payphones. He would periodically shut off power to payphones on his route, causing them to trap whatever c…