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.

Radio was a constant in my early childhood and teen years. I don’t have the old gear that I used to, but in trying to piece together old memories, I’ve searched the Internet for pictures of the now-vintage radios that I used to have. The First Radio I believe that it was Christmas Eve of 1970 when I received an AM radio as a gift from my eldest brother and his wife.

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.

A friend and I used to really enjoy playing pinball. We happened upon a group of stand up video machines in the late 1970’s as we were exiting our local mall through a Sears store. We noticed Atari’s video pinball which we thought was interesting. We played it a couple of time but we didn’t really enjoy it as much as a real pinball machine. We did, however, notice other kids our age (mid-teens), gathered around some of the other machines.

Originally published on: Sun, 08 Nov 2009 My first computer was a second-hand TRS-80 Model I with 16K of RAM and a cassette-recorder for auxiliary storage. I was 17 years old when I received this computer in the Fall of 1982. My goal? Like many kids my age at the time, I had intended to write a video game or two and live happily on the riches that would befall me.