Hi Daniel, Sorry for the late acknowledgement. Issues. :(
I found your post absolutely fascinating. The more so because, about 25 years ago, I learned to fly a helicopter. :) On Sun, 8 Sep 2024, Daniel Essin via Freedos-user wrote:
This is more of an fyi than an answer to anything. During the Vietnam War, Richard Piick developed a system for the Marine Corp to manage the helicopter
You mean Pick? I do remember hearing about it many many years ago, but at the time it seemed very niche. Little did I know, it now seems!
spare parts inventory. It combine an os, a database, query language and report writer. In the early 80's t was released for the 8086 pc (ibm AT). It required only 640 k memory an 20 mb hd and supported up to 16 users on serial terminals. It was multi-user but single-tasking.
Multi-user, single task - exactly how I've always described my software.
It was used for many business applications and became the goto system for early healthcare systems in the UK and Australia. I used it to build a medical charting system for doctors and added a billing module. I demoed on a compaq portable III with a 5-1/4 " floppy, 20 meg hd and 4 accessory serial ports.
In addition to the one or two ports which used to be standard on most PCs, I've used several different (ISA) four-port and one eight-port serial cards with my system. Never had any trouble with any of them. Now that I have USB connectivity on DOS, I'm thinking about USB-serial as well as planning to be able to use PCI cards. There will need to be some assembly code tweaks. :/
It was anything but "open source". It was later ported to various linux platforms It is still on the market and many users.
I guess it's from Rocket Software now?
I don't think they offer any version for bare-metal intel boxes. If it wasn't for the drm the old pc versions would undoubtedly still run. It could probably be reverse engineered ( a lot of work).
Having done something similar myself, I can pretty much guarantee that it would be a lot of work! :o
I mention this to illustrate the power of old hardware if used thoughtfully.
It's seemed to me for many years that most software development simply adds bloat and consumes all the available hardware performance without actually giving much to the poor user. It riles me. My 625k or so of code runs a business. To send quarterly returns to the Tax Man it now takes a hundred megabyte Java VM plus half a gigabyte of browser. The entire return consists of ten numbers in a CSV of about 80 characters! They could go in an email but that wouldn't suit top brass at the UK's Inland Revenue. They call it "Making Tax Digital". It's all required by law. Nothing I can do about it. Trouble is they seem to have very little idea what digital even means. Once you have the numbers in the computer, they have to go from there to the Tax Man without ever being typed by a human again. But they can go on a USB stick, and be posted to some accountant - who can download the numbers to his computer, and then send them to the Tax Man from there. The other day my accountant (who does this sort of thing for a lot of businesses) told me that his account on the government's tax return service had been compromised by criminals who had changed one return period from quarterly to monthly, and then used it to claim a tax refund of eight thousand pounds. When he asked the Tax Man to change the return period back to quarterly and cancel the refund request, they said they couldn't do it! It's barmy! Seems like nobody's capable of using technology thoughtfully any more. I kept asking Companies House to stop putting their CSS and Javascript in the text/plain parts of their emails. So they changed the encoding to base64. No change to the actual content. I'm thinking of trying a different approach. }:-)
I encourage you to chase your issues until they are resolved.
Within the strict limits of my discretion it's looking good so far. :) -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
