cchaven
Experienced Member
The last few nights I've been messing with my IBM 5170 that has had it's mainboard replaced with an ASL Transformer backplane and 386DX/33 cpu board. This was done circa 1992 by it's previous owner and I've had the machine for a number of years. It also has a PAS-16 soundcard, Mediavision CD-ROM, generic modem, and Trident TGA video board. The drive had been wiped when I got it and I put DOS 5.0 on it and still have some configuration of the PAS-16 and CD-ROM to do.
After getting an issue with the floppy drive sorted, I installed PowerBasic 2.1 (DOS), which I used extensively in the early 90's. I mostly programmed very small custom databases with it, including some that used dBase III compatible files. I even wrote a full inventory management system using it at one point.
The amazing thing is that I found a backup floppy disk with a bunch of my source code on it...including some DOS utilities (a DIR changing utility that allowed you to use up to 5 partial names to quickly jump from one directory to another, even several sub directories deep), a voicemail recording/playback system using the command line play/record functions of the PAS-16, a simple command line sound record/playback program for the Tandy 1000 TL series, and even some BBS stuff such as a simple host system and a program to use the HSLink protocal with a host or terminal program. There were other odds bits on there too. Most were in various levels of completion, all done in the early 90's.
I hadn't looked at this stuff in years. It was fun to look back at some of the stuff I worked on in my spare time with what I considered a nice complier. I tried making the jump to WIndows and VisualBasic, even prototyping out a comic book database with it...but the version I had didn't have any type of file I/O functions....not good for someone used to using disk based datafiles.
Anyone else still enjoy a bit of BASIC coding just for the fun of it?
Jeff
After getting an issue with the floppy drive sorted, I installed PowerBasic 2.1 (DOS), which I used extensively in the early 90's. I mostly programmed very small custom databases with it, including some that used dBase III compatible files. I even wrote a full inventory management system using it at one point.
The amazing thing is that I found a backup floppy disk with a bunch of my source code on it...including some DOS utilities (a DIR changing utility that allowed you to use up to 5 partial names to quickly jump from one directory to another, even several sub directories deep), a voicemail recording/playback system using the command line play/record functions of the PAS-16, a simple command line sound record/playback program for the Tandy 1000 TL series, and even some BBS stuff such as a simple host system and a program to use the HSLink protocal with a host or terminal program. There were other odds bits on there too. Most were in various levels of completion, all done in the early 90's.
I hadn't looked at this stuff in years. It was fun to look back at some of the stuff I worked on in my spare time with what I considered a nice complier. I tried making the jump to WIndows and VisualBasic, even prototyping out a comic book database with it...but the version I had didn't have any type of file I/O functions....not good for someone used to using disk based datafiles.
Anyone else still enjoy a bit of BASIC coding just for the fun of it?
Jeff
