"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-20, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...

[ ... ]

40:17 and 40:18 show the current up or pressed state of the
non-printing control keys. I checked them when my programs asked
the
user to "press any key" and flashed the screen alarmingly when some
joker pressed Shift.

What about if the joker decided to spell out "any". :-)

Another tech checked my programs for user friendliness and pointed out
the possible misinterpretations I was too familiar with the program to
notice.

If the engineer pushed the keyboard back on the crowded lab bench to
make room to write notes they might only be able to reach the bottom
rows, so I made Ctrl, Alt and Shift useable as Any Key to step through
the program. The arrow keys navigated through the display of binary
registers and Space toggled the highlighted bit. They still had to
reach Enter to load the registers into the target device.

Since they didn't make measurements while changing the program setup
they could pull the keyboard forward and use all the keys, for
instance to save the current settings in a *.ini file.

................
Which OS for the Macs? Their fully proprietary one, or OS-X,
which is at least unix-based. Not that I would expect either to be
particularly good at real-time I/O. :-)

That was the early 90's so AFAIK the "Classic" Mac OS. All that
mattered to me was that the engineer was satisfied with my efforts to
design and build what they couldn't buy. There were many opportunities
in the broad gap between Ph.Ds and lab techs if I could demonstrate
that I could handle them.

DOS was fine in real time before SpeedStep, as long as I could
accomplish everything after a clock tick and then wait for the next
one. The gap is about 55 mS, the interrupt service 20 uS. After
fussing with my 900 KHz homebrew it was amazing to watch a FOR loop
execute at 2 nS per pass.

But in the days before that, at the Army R&D lab where I worked,
you could not purchase anything called a "computer" for use in the
lab.
(The exception was the one IBM 370.) So, to get a computer, you
had
to
call it something like "an instrument controller". :-)


Add LabVIEW and a GPIB card and that's exactly what it is.

Bub -- before those were available, it was easier to get an HP
desktop machine and call it an instrument controller. And it would
have
built in the HPIB (before the name got changed to GPIB or IEEE-488.
:-)

For that matter -- I have a couple of examples of Tektronix 6130
systems with built-in GPIB, and as an OS a Tek modified version of
BSD
4.2.

My experience with the 8080 was enough to quickly solve problems by
programming the PC-AT and an HP 1000 in Assembly. When I came up with
an out-of-the-box way to solve a sticky problem I only got to
implement the simple ones, otherwise an engineer would do it and take
credit. What counted was that they included me in the next new product
team and gave me some design work.

-jsw