CAT doesn't work after Windows update

Chris DL5NAM

No; your not right. It's always Dayton! The real questions is: what year! ;-)

Walt - KZ1F

Mike, that stmt isn't a problem, its a solution. There are plenty of people who have to be early adopters, like developers who either have products that have to work or they have to mitigate the damage by have solutions ready for customers when they adopt the new release like they bought new Dell machines, forcing the change.

Walt - KZ1F

You have a point there Chris. However Steve did say they will start 2.0 work in earnest after 1.6. I'd guess next fall. It might well be there is a lot of low hanging fruit they can implement that will start the 2.0 revenue stream rolling in.

Michael Coslo

I'm not a programmer. That is not where my expertise lies.

I base may reasoning on working with multiple systems, and one of them is often broken. I made executive level pay and perks for my ability to quickly assess and get Windows systems back working after updates - There were many problems, possibly due to our using many different devices on the computers. But on the other computers - almost no problems

Anyhow, be patient with me. I am neither as smart nor as knowledgable as many users, as you so clearly point out point out. I am however -  fortunate to be around smart people who can point me in the right direction as needed. 

So I do apologize for offending you - it wasn't on purpose.

Mark_WS7M

No need to apologize to me Michael...  I am a low-level device programmer for close to 35 years now and there are still some things that baffle me about how everything fits together.

Frankly, I'm still amazed at how well our computers work considering mass production and pricing.  I don't think many here have a clue how exacting the timing is inside these laptops and desktop boxes to get everything to work right.

Just after the Apple II came out I was in the process of building my own Z80 based system as a learning experience and I was trying to get interrupts to work so that every time I closed a switch the OS (hand coded) would jump into a subroutine to process the switch input.

I spent hours and hours on that and it was glitchey as heck.  Not too surprising the fix that got it working was code.  I basically had to deal with the switch bounce but not allow the IRQ routine to re-enter on the next closure until a certain amount of time passed.  Once I figured that out it was rock solid.

I hooked that little circuit up to a rotary wheel that spun copper contacts past a switch and used it to measure wind speed.  The next issue I had was when the wind got up to 50 mph the switch closures were coming too fast for the routine to process.

Anyway I digress, but the point is we all have our talents and things we are good at and if you are having great luck with your computers perhaps you are doing something right.  For me I generally have good luck then something goes terribly wrong.

The last terribly wrong event was when I realized my automated backup had stopped running and as I tried to correct it my computer suffered a disk crash on the very disk I was backing up.  Sigh... lots of work lost in that sad event.  That ushered in the error of redundant backups for me.

Mark

Michael Coslo

Of course - my comment was facetious. My inner group at work had three of us. One fellow was an early adopter - first day out type person, I was a wait until the first service pack in Windows, and another guy was trying to use the same software until the Adobe suite wouldn't support his OS any more. Or I denied him access to the group server!  That happened after his copy of the suite was three versions behind and he couldn't do half the stuff we needed to do.

It takes all three types. I learnd the problems troubleshooting guy one's computer, Used my main computer with stable versions, and the other guy was just there to annoy me I think.

Walt - KZ1F

Mike, I believe that is precisely the marching orders the new Microsoft CEO recently gave the troops. As I recall, and this was in the last few months, he gave the entire dev organization a time out to identify and fix these and other, like the sieve of a virus catcher, that Microsoft is known for being.

Michael Coslo

I have this freaky recurring dream of Windows coming out based on Unix...

KY6LA_Howard

@Mark
Your Switch bounce story rings very familiar with me..

Back in the early 60's we were inventing computerized traffic control.. One of the issues was putting in a button for pedestrians to push to change the lights so that the lights would change so that they could cross the streets..

So we put in a couple of test buttons.. and suddenly our mainframes were inundated with hundreds of requests to cross the streets.. So I went out with an Oscilloscope to look at the bottoms ... saw that each push caused switch bounces resulting in the hundreds of requests...  Wrote an assembler routine to de-bounce the switches.. it works now..

BTW.. when you push that Pedestrian request button it really works.. HOWEVER the light change may not be instantaneous as it must be slotted into the correct traffic speed controls sequence so as not to disrupt the timing of traffic flow.. that can take upwards of 2 minutes which to a pedestrian may seem like it is not working,..or it is a placebo....

Mark_WS7M

Actually... It is interesting you bring that up.  I was living in Seattle when the IBM PC came out.  I was a part of the NW computer society and met both Bill Gates on several occasions and the guy from Seattle Computer Products (I think that was the name) that sold M$ the original MSDOS used on the PC.

I remember working on MSDOS 1.0 and just being frustrated and wondering WHY... when M$ had full access to several Unix variants that MSDOS was not a restricted UNIX with a better shell.

I even asked a M$ guy about that one time and he said it was business again in that by completely owning the OS M$ could do what it wanted and sell it for whatever price they wanted.  I think with UNIX there would have been some issues.

I used to get sad thinking about it because I knew UNIX pretty well and knew how powerful the file locking and multi-tasking features were.  When MSDOS came out it just felt like a really dumb and **** OS.  I hated it and could not believe the IBMPC had not built an OS on top of UNIX considering how much was already done.

Anyway, later when Windows came out it was clear again that things will still in early development.  I remember trying to get file locking to work in Windows 3.1 and pulling my hair out over it.

I personally wish M$ had done exactly what you say... I wish they'd started with UNIX, kept the kernel and base features.  Given it a better initial shell than the cryptic csh and others of the time.  But left them there for the power users.

I then wish Windows had been built on top of that platform.  Anyway just my 2c.

Don Agro

A GUI on top of Unix! Why didn't Steve Jobs think of that ? Oh wait...

Mark_WS7M

@Howard,  I did a computer engineering class where we had to use a Z80 based computer to optimize the flow of railroad traffic with 4 crossing trains.  We had the ability to start, stop and set max speed of the trains (basically an analog output).  Our "stop lights" were basically stop commands to the trains.

We were given a task to make each of the four trains run four complete circuits of it's track.  Each train was different so the max speeds were different and the tracks were different lengths.  We had sensors that told us we were approaching an intersection and that we'd cleared the intersection.

It was a killer fun project but on mid-term day the instructor oiled up two of the trains.  It was a sight to behold as algorithms that had run flawlessly for weeks suddenly sent trains flying off the table and smashing into each other.  

Yes I admit, mine failed just as badly.  Seems we'd all used some inherit knowledge on how long the trains take to decelerate.   Only one person got it right.  It was a very young Japanese girl that barely spoke English.  After that she was our idol.  Her trains ran the track perfectly whether oiled or not, weighed down or not.  We all wanted to be her after that!

Mark_WS7M

@Don, I can't remember when the big switch for Apple happened, was it OS 9?  Anyway ya... When Apple went with GUI over Unix I was a happy guy!

Don Agro

1997, SJ returned to Apple and got them to buy NextXT - which was NextStep on top of Unix - this became OS X. It was also the platform that created the first web browser by Tim Berners-Lee

George KF2T

Thanks guys. I tried Sound Siphon a while ago without good results. May be time to try again. Mark, mind shooting me a quick look at your config?

Walt - KZ1F

Remember, Windows started life as a UI on top of DOS. It wasn't until Dave Cutler was hired, told Gates it was never going to happen with their existing staff, and brought out his VMS staff that M$ got anything resembling an OS.

Mark_WS7M

Since I was living in Seattle and part of the computer groups there I obtained a very very early alpha of "UI on DOS" and as you say Walt it was exactly that.  A flimsy UI running on a lousy OS.  I played with it for a bit and didn't think it had a future.  I guess I was right!!!

Walt - KZ1F

My first 'commercial' Windows program was on Windows 1.03. Calling DOS an OS is being incredibly gracious, no task control, interval control, storage control, darn near no control. Back in 77, or 78, I bought a vdp-42 running IMDOS. I rewrote it to support limited multi threading

Walt - KZ1F

No problem, I realized you said it tongue in cheek.

KY6LA_Howard

@Mark You make me feel so ancient] The Z80 was invented more than a decade after we solved the multi-intersection traffic flow equations. By the time the Z80 came into existence we had already done controls for a number or rail, subways and canals and we were well advanced into real time vehicle tracking for public transit systems before GPS. That 4 train model would,have been fun but a real PIA with the mainframes we had to use.

Walt - KZ1F

Z80 came out long after the 808x series came out. My Imsai VDP-42 ran an Intel 8085 which was 50% faster than the 8080 predecessor. That was in 77 or 78, That was the reason I got the Imsai over the MITS Altair which used an Intel 8080.

You realize, do you not, you opened a really wide door for pretty much anyone to enter. So..... yes, you are, in deed, so very ancient. :-)

N7BCP

For the computer nerds, you may enjoy this book: Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution

KY6LA_Howard

@Walt. More ancient history

We used Intel 4004 in local traffic controllers. When we started to work on real time transit vehicle tracking, we needed a more powerful computer to run the radios and the tracking software on the city buses. Intel was working on a new chip...the 8008. So I flew out to San Jose and talked Intel into lending me a development system. It was so rare and valuable that Intel would not trust it to air freight or luggage. So they made me rent a car and drive it back east.

Yes I feel ancient.

Mark_WS7M

Wait!  Howard!?  They had cars back then!?  (just kidding)

KY6LA_Howard

Yes. But lots of them still had hand cranks and lanterns that you lit with a match

Mark_WS7M

Howard, I'd love to sit down and have a cup of coffee with you someday.  I think you have a wonderfully colorful past.  Are you near San Diego?  I visit my sister sometimes out there.

KY6LA_Howard

I am in La Jolla..(a suburb of SD) .I will be in town until late May except for Visalia and Dayton. I don't drink coffee but I have a great wine collection. Feel free to drop by. If you hit a major contest weekend I can drag u up the the contest station. BTW. I sometimes wish it had been a bit less colorful as the bleeding edge can hurt a lot.

Rick Hadley - W0FG

You guys are dredging up lots of old memories.  I was never a professional programmer, but my first computer was a SWTPC 6800 system, kit built, with 24k of RAM, an SWTPC CT-64 terminal, and a Smoke Signal Broadcasting 3-floppy disk drive running their DOS and a giant IBM EBCIDIC printer converted to ASCII. Eventually we replaced the 6800 board with a SS50 Z-80 board to run CP/M.  The first useful program I wrote was one to do depreciation schedules for farm income tax returns.  Did that one in Basic.  The next project was writing a utility billing program for the town where I worked.  Did that one first in Basic, then later converted it to dBaseII or III for the Osborne 1 I  then had in my office.

Ken - NM9P

This thread has gone far afield, but it is very interesting!  and nostalgic....I am not as well-seasoned as Howard, Walt, Mark, Rick, and others, but there is a fair bit of rust under my keyboard!

My intro to computing was in 1977 when my younger brother got a TRS-80 Model 1 (Original with 4K RAM & programs were saved to a Cassette recorder)

in college, as a Math & Physics Major, (1978-1980) we used an HP-9820 overgrown calculator that took a whole desktop along with its pen-plotter.  We used it to plot graphs equations (and to do computer-generated "artwork" dependent upon formulae - like a very expensive Spirograph.)  It was programmed in an early form of BASIC, storing the programs on 2-inch wide magnetic strips that were from 8 - 16 inches long, depending upon how much storage you needed.

We also used a room-filling Honeywell system that was programmed with punch-cards.  I learned Fortran on it, but it also did COBOL and ALGOL, neither of which I learned.  (The business and accounting students ran those)

My Senior year (1980) they installed a multi-station HP 3000 Series II with dumb terminals in many places across campus.  We primarily used BASIC (I think BASIC-A) on it.  It was the first one with storage that students could use to store their programs.  But we were limited to the amount of storage.  If you put too much on it, the sysop would raid your storage area and delete stuff that he thought was unnecessary.  

There was a game called WUMPUS that was used to teach logic and pseudo Artificial Intelligence.  There was another one like it that was based upon a Star Trek theme.  We were supposed to run them from the class common directory to save storage space, but some of us copied it into our private storage areas so we could modify it and learn more programming skills.  One day when I tried to run it, the Sysop had deleted almost every line and replaced it with a simple line that printed a message on the screen "THE KLINGONS HAVE DISCOVERED THE ENTERPRISE AND DESTROYED IT.....PLEASE LIMIT YOUR STORAGE SPACE TO APPROVED PROJECTS!"  I was ticked and amused at the same time...

After College Graduation I purchased my own VIC-20 and played around a lot, making RTTY dumb terminals and CW decoders, etc. 

During my last year of Grad School (December 1984) I got a Tandy 1000 PC It was Tandy's Original competition to the IBM PC...It featured 128K RAM, a green screen, two 360K Floppies and a 300 Baud telephone modem -- all for about $2700  - and NO Hard drive.  I got a 48 MB hard drive later for $419 and upgraded the RAM to 640K for another $400.  This was my first "Real Computer!"

The list goes on and on with various 8086, 8088, Z80, and 386, 486, Pentium, etc.  including Timex-Sinclair 1000, COCO 2, COCO 3, TRS-80 Model 4D, etc.....  Have run MS-DOS 1.0, TRS-DOS, CPM, Many versions of Linux,  and Windows all the way from Windows 3.1 on up.  

Software packages included Homeword, PC-Writer, Multiplan, Lotus 123, As well as Tandy Deskmate, MS-Works, MS-Office, and many, many freeware/shareware packages whose names escape me.

I look back and can't believe the changes in cost, power, sophistication, and irritation I have seen!

THanks for the trip down memory lane!

The bottom line is that every leap of progress always seems to include a great leap of frustration in the transition.  But eventually we adapt...and wait for the next "leap" of progress!  Isn't it fun?

Ken - NM9P

DH2ID

Although I would love to add to all the interesting IT history stories, I just want to point out, that an OS, that has a lot of bugs and breaks virtual devices is NO OS. I wonder why somebody would update his working system to Windows 10. I like to stay ahead and at the bleeding edge of technology myself, but an OS is just the base on which to run your system and that Base should be reliable and stable. I -at this moment - don't see MS developing a better OS than Windows 7. Now for OS-X. ...