In the mid-1980’s, I’d owned a used TRS-80 Model I for about a year when I had a yearning for a newer system. I only had cassette-based storage which proved to be unreliable. I had a 16K machine and I had a few games and tools for the TRS-80. I learned Z-80 assembly language and I was having a lot of fun tinkering, but that particular line of computers had met its end.

Once Upon a Time In 2009, I created an image capture utility for Windows called Pic2File. It wasn’t like a number of capture utilities. For Pic2File to function, images needed to be copied to the Windows clipboard. Pic2File would scan the clipboard periodically for images. If image content was present on the clipboard, it would save the image to the specified file format in a sequentially-numbered file. It then clears the clipboard data.

“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration” – Edsger Dijkstra My early days of computing began in the late 1970’s. I used to go in to the Radio Shack in the mall where they would let the patrons type stuff into their display-model TRS-80. You could tell that none of the patrons were skilled in any type of computer language as the screen was filled with a line of nonsense followed by a line indicating that a syntax-error had occurred.

In the late 80’s, my programming team was in search of a decent programmer’s text editor for MS-DOS. At the time, a number of editors seemed to have comparable features. Any missing features could often be added via the embedded macro language that each of these editors sported. What was it that helped to make the decision? The advertisement from American Cybernetics above ( excerpted from the late, great Computer Language magazine ) caught our eye.

Originally published on: Sat, 22 May 2010 The first computer in my household was a Radio Shack TRS-80 pocket computer that my dad owned. My brother got it for him as a birthday gift in 1980. This was essentially a calculator with a pretty nifty BASIC interpreter built in. The BASIC was not without its own personality. Although it supported arrays, I found that if I DIM’ed an array “A” and placed a value in A(2) … variable “B” would get clobbered.

I saw another Facebook “squares” puzzle this morning. Here is the blank image: Here are the squares that I count: I see the first eight in the image above. …nine.. …ten… …eleven… …twelve… …thirteen… …fourteen… …fifteen… …sixteen… …seventeen… …and the entire puzzle is one big square. That makes eighteen.

Originally Published on August 2, 2012 A number of my Facebook friends have been posting a puzzle based on the image below. How many squares can you count in the above image. I count 40. I’ve included several sequences of the puzzle with squares colored in red and yellow to illustrate the ones I see. First, let’s just count the basic squares across and down. That gives us 16.

Originally published on: Tue, 04 Aug 2009 I needed a little mental exercise tonight, so I chose to write a quine ( a program that produces its own source as its output ) in the Forth programming language? Why Forth? Because I’m a novice Forth programmer at best. I don’t think very well in Forth, so this took some effort. Here’s the quine: ( the source for this quine is in the public domain )

Originally published in Commodore Hacking electronic magazine #15, April 1998 In the early 70’s, Charles Moore designed one of the most powerful computing languages known. This language, Forth, was very different from the traditional procedural languages. Forth is a language which allows the programmer to change most any facet of the language they wish ( including syntax extensions ). Forth’s rapid acceptance on 8-bit microcomputers stemmed from the fact that it took a relatively small amount of memory to properly implement the language.

This post was formerly hosted at a couple of my other blogs. I’ve moved it here. It was originally posted in 2000. If you’ve ever used a Forth compiler, chances are you’ve heard the name Tom Zimmer. Tom’s been a staple in the Forth community for a few decades. Tom developed a number of Forth systems for popular 8-bit microcomputers that dominated the home-computer market in the 80’s. Tom is the creator of the freeware Win32Forth system.