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1. Modula 2 is the language of choice for modern software engineering and _ LOGITECH Modula 2 is the most powerful implemen tation available for the PC The right language and the right tools have come together in one S superior product Whether you re working on a small program or a complex project with LOGITECH Modula 2 Versiof3 0 you can write more reliable maintainable better docu mented code in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost NEW IMPROVED X COMPILER Faster and more flexible Now its DOS linker compatible object files OBJ can be linked with existing libraries in C PASCAL FORTRAN and ASSEMBLER so you can build on previous development and put the power of LOGITECH Modula to work for you right now Fully supports Wirth s latest language definition including LONGINT and LONGSET which provides large set support including SET of CHAR Provides FREE TURBO PASCAL onoi i TO LOGITECH MODULA 2 e ae optimization or tighter more TRANSLATOR efficient code generation NEW IMPROVED SERERE E DEBUG GERS Our new mouse based editor is fully l i l C LOGITECH Modula 2 integr fed easy to learn fast and easy Time gained with a fast compiler can V 3 0 Compiler Pack 99 to use and very customizable Its te of j Compiler in overlay and fully linked form ide i ee be lost 2 debug u
2. Reader Service Number 85 PAUL MACE SOFTWARE INC MACE UTILITIES Data recovery and disk optimization tools Eliminates hard disk risks and optimizes hard disk performance 99 00 HTEST HFORMAT Advanced hard disk diagnostics Delivers what the manufacturer promised 89 95 400 Williamson Way Ashland OR 97520 800 523 0258 Ge E Reader Service Number 65 Instruction Manuals for your product Written in an informal style by techies for real users Free quote Rare Earth Services Inc 3115 Willow Road NW Roanoke VA 24017 703 343 4565 Reader Service Number 73 A Micro Ad is an inexpensive way to reach over 22 000 technical folks like yourself To place a Micro Ad just print out your message make it short and sweet and mail it to Micro C We ll typeset your ad no charge and run it in the next available issue You can also send camera ready copy Rates 99 for 1 time 267 for three times 474 for 6 times a best buy at only 79 per insertion Full payment must accompany ad Each ad space is 2 1 4 inches by 1 3 4 inches QUALITY SPEECH 1 0 PRODUCTS Digitized speech synthetic text to speech voice recognition music composing with voice and more are available in hardware software systems from COVOX IBM PC XT AT and compatibles Apple Commodore and Atari machines support ed Easy programming for fun and education Or use to design your own products for this rapidly e
3. 5 thru 20 Standard printer 02 PRN printer Open handles o ae FFh THE COMPLETE COMPUTER RECIPE SYSTEM Use your personal computer to plan your weekly meals parties and special Holiday meals Includes 75 basic recipes and 500 recipe references from 5 popular cookbooks Easy to use screens to help you set up your own recipes and categories Add up to 200 of your own recipes up to 1200 recipe references Has a unique feature to help you create a cross reference index of recipes giving the recipe name book or magazine and page number Has fast easy to use software to help you with your recipe selections Adjust ingredients from 1 99 servings Print recipes for friends and kitchen use Prints the shopping list too 39 50 Apple l lle lic one disk drive 006 Order 523A IBM PC JR XT AT amp compatibles 128KB 1 disk dr 523 Add 2 for shipping amp handling Send check or Money Order SATISFACTION GUARANTEED 800 356 0909 a THE COMpL Ere tanmen 7 BECWE YS 7 EH EIAI A E N SZ E t F IN NEW YORK CALL 800 341 1950 EXT 889 FREE PC Write V2 71 complete word processor or Spectacular Two Player Real Time SPACEWAR V1 71 with every order FREE No charge for UPS Ground No surcharge for VISA or Mastercard 24 hour 1200 Baud order line 914 241 9324 Customer Technical Support 914 666 8119 No APO FPO or international orders
4. 65 00 MONITORS EGA CGA Auto Switch 452 00 VGA EGA CGA Color 600 00 CGA Color aioin ndaid 295 00 Amber 12 TEL orei aiseria 89 00 Green 12 TTL e aE EEE hoek 89 00 VIDEO CARDS Color Graphics Parallel 52 00 256K EGA Graphics 125 00 Mono Graphics Parallel 49 00 ATI Graphics Solution Mono Herc Color Emulation on Mono CGA List 299 125 00 ATI Wonder Auto Switch Mono Herc Any monitor Any software Auto conversion CGA EGA VGA List 499 299 00 EGA CGA PGA 640x480 185 00 EXPANSION CARDS Clock C rdenas cages 25 00 Dual Floppy Disk Controller 25 00 Joystick oiar ene tie totes cute 25 00 Gravis Analog Joystick 49 95 Game Port ensenen 19 00 Multi Function 1 ser par clk game ZC PLOPDY EAEE AE E E 61 00 Parallel printer 45 19 00 Serial Port RS232 1 port 29 00 640K RAM QK installed 35 00 XT AT RS232 4 port 2 installed 59 00 Prices are subject to change without notice Shipping CHARGES will be added 2 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 Pictured keyboard is 5339 KIT OPTIONS MS DOS 3 21 or 3 3 w 5339 Keyboard Sub Color Options Includes video card amp monitor CGA EGA Color CGA EGA VGA Color ASSEMBLY AND TESTING XT Systems AT 80386 Systems MOTHERBOARDS XT Turbo 4 77
5. LJ MASTERCARD C Issue av C Compilers ate newstand price GRAND TOTAL To Place Your Order Immediately CALL 1 800 888 8087 9 5 M F Pacific Time a Bee fa Are you a current Micro C subscriber L Yes NAME COMPANY ADDRESS E af chen ett aaa lh ted Ate tala STATE Expires L No MICRO TECHNICAL JOURNAL MRO CORNUCOPIA edn SAHN MAY JUNE 1988 ISSUE NO 41 Write in the reader service numbers NAME of any advertisers from whom you would like to receive free informa COMPANY tion ADDRESS CITY STATE____ ZIP FOLD HERE Wi POSTAGE WILL BE PAID BY ADDRESSEE THE MICRO TECHNICAL JOURNAL MICRO CORNUCOPIA P O Box 223 Bend OR 97709 0223 FOLD HERE Diagnostic Issue e Symptoms and Solutions Curing Your XT or AT Theory of Operation for the XT e Drive Faults and Fixes Plus e 3 D Graphics Part II More on Marketing Your Own Software Laine Takes on OS 2 STAPLE TO CLOSE NO POSTAGE NECESSARY IF MAILED IN THE UNITED STATES ESSERE ESE RSLKLKLUKRKE SCE LEE SERRE ERR BBR ERE EES CEES SSeS IBM RE ESE LSS ERE AEE SSE SL SCABRSSRE SSCS SCS Fill in your back issues of Micro C today Oe ISSUE 14 10 83 ISSUE 21 12 84 ISSUE 26 10 85 ISSUE 31 8 86 ISSUE 36 6 87 BBII Installation Analog To Digital Interface Inside ZCPR3 RAM Resident PC Speedup Build A Midi Interface For Your PC The Perfect Terminal Installing Turbo Pascal Two
6. 1 Use any dBASE file amp fields up to 214 characters or numeric 2 Automatically track outgoing multi copy letters amp variants 3 Select any fields at run time for letter integration adjacent fields for block text 4 Branch to alternate letters in a single mallmerge pass then summarize regional actions 5 Copy any fields to subsequent records either old or newly appended for letter contract production 6 Make consistent structure extended data dictionaries in dB format for transparent systems management 7 Produce correctly tabbed 2 3 or 5 col tables for Ventura Publisher from any dB file 8 Other dB file management amp production utilities 2 col Harvard Publisher tables other wp s on request 9 On disk documentation manual tutorial examples letter contract skeletons Hardcopy manual 12 extra 10 Use to customize Invoicing systems meeting management operations without programming e NOT COPY PROTECTED e Mail order only 10 secondary sales rebate e Money order or personal check allow ten days to clear SEND TO HARGER I N T P O Box 20 Grand Central Station JKT Pouch New York New York 10163 ONLY 45 dBASE il amp dBASE Ill are trademarks of Ashton Tate Wordstar amp Mailmerge are trademarks of MicroPro Apple Il is a trademark of Apple Computer Inc Softcard MS DOS amp Microsoft are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation CP M is a trademark of Digita Research Inc PC DOS is a t
7. E1 b vl Val E2 b v2 Val EL E2 b vl v2 lt Val El1 b v1 Val E2 b v2 Val E1 E2 b v1 v2 lt Val E1l b v1 Val E2 b v2 Val E1l E2 b 1 lt Val E1 b v1l Val E2 b v2 Val El E2 b 0 lt Val E1 b vl Val E2 b v2 Val El E2 b 1 lt Val E1 b v1 Val E2 b v2 Val E1 E2 b 0 lt Val E1 b vl Val E2 b v2 AANWINS Number D v lt Dig D v Number ND 10 v d lt Dig D d Number N v Dig 0 0 lt Dig 1 1 lt Dig 9 9 lt Select V v Jt V v lt Select W w t V v lt V lt gt W Select t V v Eval V E S bi bo lt Val E bi v Newb bi V v bb Eval S bb bo Eval if E then S1 else S2 end S bi bo lt Val E bi 0 Eval S2 bi bb Eval S bb bo Eval if E then Sl else S2 end S bi bo lt Val E bi 1 Eval S1 bi bb Eval S bb bo Eval if E then S1 end S bi bo lt Eval if E then S1 else end S bi bo Eval while E do S1 end S bi bo lt Eval if E then S1 while E do S1 end end S bi bo Newb V w it V v UV v 1t lt Newb W w t V v CW w tt lt W lt gt Vv Newb t V v tt END OF LISTING I By Paul J Voda Complete Logic Syste
8. If all this sounds more complicated than it should be you re right But it s workable because Reflection runs very easily By the way Reflection translates any of the following to any of the following Amiga ILBM Compuserve GIF Halo CUT H P PCL Inset PIX Lotus PIC MACPAINT PC Paintbrush PCX text TIF Reflection 89 00 IMSI 1299 Fourth St San Rafael CA 94901 Theoretical Issue If this issue doesn t give your brain a charley horse then you re either just out of school which means your brain al ready has a charley horse or you re a lot like that perverse as sociate editor Gary Entsminger It s not that this isn t an interesting issue It s quite interest ing But then Micro C has become famous for mucking around in the fun cheap practical crannies of computing We re project oriented not theoretical But once in awhile a little theoretical is good for you Like a a a a a a EE salad It stretches your brain exercises your imagination helps you grow hair in all the right places This was supposed to be an AI issue It is sort of But it s much broader than that and I m glad I think that classic AI is in the doldrums right now I think people are afraid of it Meanwhile our C issue Issue 40 generated more excite ment more feedback more activity on the RBBS more mail more newsstand sales more new subscribers from word of mouth more everything than anything we ve ev
9. Thus we can represent numbers from 65535 to 65535 2 to 2 with a resolution of 0 00002 2 Let A be a real number and sup pose a is the integer representation of A in the computer Then A and a are related by the simple formula Az a 2 Suppose B and b are similarly related a representation of A B be comes a 27 b 2716 A B a b 2 So a b is the fixed point repre sentation of A B In other words fixed point addition is just simple in teger addition Subtraction works the same way For multiplication observe that A B a 2776 b 2716 a b 2716 26 Thus the representation for A B is just a b shifted right 16 bits For division a 275 b 277 a b a b 27 x 27 A B So fixed point division is integer division followed by a left shift of 16 bits 34010 Programming This will be the first time many readers see 34010 program code so TIl briefly summarize the 34010 The 34010 has 30 general purpose 32 bit registers which are denoted AO A14 and BO B14 The stack pointer can be denoted by SP A15 or B15 The B registers have special uses in the advanced graphic instructions For example in the PIXBLT pixel block transfer instruction the B registers con tain the source and destination start ad dress the block size and window dimensions for clippi
10. forces the 8088 to pull its LOCK output low for the duration of the in struction LOCK can then be used by the system to restrict bus access during semaphore updates But the PC doesn t need semaphores and uses LOCK in a different manner During a locked instruction the PC refuses to acknowledge hold requests from the DMA controller I m not sure what purpose this serves If anyone has made use of the lock prefix in 8088 as sembly code I d like to hear from you 40 MICROCORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 8087 Coordination The queue status outputs QSO and QS1 provide information about use of the instruction queue See Figure 4 If your system has an 8087 it uses this in formation to help route instructions to the coprocessor Two request grant pins RQ GTO and RQ GT1 let coprocessors request use of the bus The PC implements only the second of these for communication between the 8088 and the 8087 Both the request and grant are active low pulses When the 8087 needs the bus it yanks RQ GT1 low for one clock cycle Assuming a LOCK condition doesn t exist we re not in the middle of accessing a word of memory and we re not at the beginning of an interrupt acknowledge sequence the 8088 finishes its current bus cycle if any and responds with another one clock pulse on RQ GT1 This grant pulse tells the 8087 that the 8088 has released the bus When the 8087 finishes using the bus it sends a one clock pulse t
11. og ad Panai ee a m a Cal oy 82 Tidbits 96 Last Page MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 3 THE MICRO TECHNICAL JOURNAL MICRO CORNUCOPIA Editor amp Publisher David J Thompson Associate Editors Gary Entsminger Cary Gatton Technical Department Larry Fogg Director of Advertising Laura Logan Accounting Sandra Thompson Order Department Tammy Westfall Graphic Design Carol Steffy MICRO CORNUCOPIA ISSN 0747 587X is published bi monthly for 18 per year by Micro Cornucopia Inc 155 NW Hawthorne Bend OR 97701 Second class postage paid at Bend OR and additional mailing offices POSTMASTER Send address changes to MICRO CORNUCOPIA PO Box 223 Bend OR 97709 SUBSCRIPTION RATES 1 yr 6 issues 2 yr 12 issues 3 yr 18 issues 1 yr Canada amp Mexico 1 yr Other foreign Make all orders payable in U S funds on a U S bank please CHANGE OF ADDRESS Please send your old label and new address MICRO CORNUCOPIA P O Box 223 Bend Oregon 97709 CUSTOMER SERVICE for orders amp sub scription problems call 503 382 5060 9 am to 5 pm Pacific time M F For technical help call 503 382 8048 9 am to noon Pacific time M F RBBS 24 hrs 300 1200 2400 baud 8 Bits No Parity 1 Stop Bit 503 382 7643 Copyright 1988 by Micro Cornucopia Inc All rights reserved ISSN 0747 587X 4 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 By David Thompson Museum Pieces
12. Because we assumed that Boltzmann s energy distribution applies to our neural network behavior At low temperatures the system tends to converge into the global minimum but the time required to stabilize is very long On the other hand at high temperatures it is more willing to make uphill jumps so it reaches a stable state faster The best compromise is to start at a high temperature and gradually reduce it as the machine approaches thermal equilibrium a process known as simu lated annealing Annealing comes from the art of crystallizing metal to get the best crystallization you alternately heat and cool the metal until it hardens Here you re alternately increasing and decreas ing the activity of the model trying to reach the global minimum d Now run the machine at the equi librium temperature Tq and update the units as in c above except this time modify the weights after each update using Awi 5sis where si is the state of unit i and 6 is a small positive real number for example 5 0 005 e Repeat 2 for the next pair of inputs and outputs sometimes called the vector 3 PHASE The Testing Phase a Clamp a part of the vector onto the MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 19 input units b Same as 2 b c Same as 2 c d Same as 2 d except now the weight change is Awi s 8j 4 Repeat from 1 until the machine learns that is when the output unit
13. Motherboard 6 amp 10 Meg Zero Wait State 8 Expansion Slots 80286 Processor Math Co Processor Option 1 Meg RAM On Board Phoenix Bios 200 Watt Power Supply Hercules Compat Video Board Parallel Board 2 Serial Ports Active Game Port Clock Calendar Hard Disk amp Floppy Controller 20M Hard Drive 1 2M 5 Floppy Drive 360K 5 Floppy Drive 5061 Keyboard Mini AT Case with Turbo amp Reset Hard Drive Light and Keyboard Disable Switch Amber Graphics Monitor 1531 EGA ADD 449 40M HD ADD _ 150 8280 Clairemont Mesa Blvd Suite 117 San Diego California 92111 619 569 1864 XT TURBO Motherboard 5 amp 8 MHz Switchable 8088 V20 Optional Optional Co processor 8 Expansion Slots ERSO or Bison Bios 640K RAM 150 Watt Power Supply Hercules Compat Video Board Parallel Board 2 Serial Ports Active Game Port Clock Calendar Hard Disk and Floppy Controller 20M 5 Hard Drive 2 ea 360K 5 Floppy Drive AT Style Keyboard Standard Slide Case Amber Graphics Monitor 999 EGA ADD 429 40M HD ADD 150 5 amp 10MHz ADD 21 UNINTERRUPTIBLE POWER SUPPLY 129 ELGAR MODEL SPR401 THESE SUPPLIES MAY HAVE SOME MINOR COSMETIC DAMAGE BUT ARE ELECTRICALLY SOUND 350VA WAVEFORM RECTANGULAR RUN ON INTERNAL OR EXTERNAL 24VDC BATTERY WHEN LINE GOES DOWN TYPICAL TRANSFER TIME KAYPRO EQUIPMENT 9 Green Monitor Keyb0ald 42 kdeunaus wen vate Hard Disk Cable Set 4 PRO 8 Mod to
14. Upgrades availabe for only 25 FORMAT DUPLICATE Disks from over 300 other micros from previous versions 00 Call for Authorization 5 174 DSDD DISKETTES ea 8 SSSD DISKETTES aS s DC300A DATA CART USED 2 55 HAYWARD CA 94545 415 786 9203 TERMS Pre payment COD Visa Mastercard California residents add sales tax Orders are FOB Hayward CA Shipments by UPS Ground unless otherwise requested Prices and availability are subject to change without notice All products are assembled and tested and have a 30 day warranty unless otherwise stated Call or write for current product and Price listing Xerox is a trademark of Xerox Corporation CP M is a trademark of Digital Research Reader Service Number 33 68 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 To Order Contact gt S lt ENGSUFT 2210 SIXTH ST BERKELEY CA 94710 415 644 9386 Reader Service Number 39 ERAC Motherboard 6 amp 10 Meg Zero Wait State 8 Expansion Slots 1 Meg RAM On Board Math Co processor Option Phoenix Bios 200 Watt Power Supply Hercules Compat Video Board Parallel Port 2 Serial Ports Active Game Port Clock Calendar Hard Disk amp Floppy Controller 20M Hard Drive 1 2M 5 Floppy Drive 360K 5 Floppy Drive 5061 Keyboard Case with Turbo amp Reset Hard Drive Light and Keyboard Disable Switch Amber Graphics Monitor 1581 EGA ADD 449 40M HD ADD 150 6 amp 12 MHz ADD 73 CO BABY AT
15. utility func started you will find the approach an illustration of how to construct _ tions including windows menus memory and use units 7 resident applications interrupt Service rou i boo hak 9 3 i c4 tines intervention code and direct video cd POWER TOOLS PLUS is a library of over 180 powerful functions access for fast screen handling For Turbo and procedures like fast direct video access general screen 455 n handling including multiple monitors VGA and EGA 50 ine TOOLS PLUS nee 8029 00 and 43 line text mode and full keyboard support including i screen handling and EGA 43line text mode the 101 102 key keyboard Stackable and removable win support direct screen access DOS file han dows with optional borders titles and cursor memory _ gt dling and more Sp cifically designed for E provide complete windowing capabilities Horizontal ver Microsoft C5 0 and QuickC y tical grid and Lotus style menus can be easily incorporated ASYNCH M AN AGER into your programs using the menu management routines Full featured interrupt driven support for the You can create the same kind of moving pull down menus 7e COM ports 1 O buffers up to 64K XON F that Turbo Pascal 4 0 uses XOFE up to 9600 baud modem control and Control DOS memory allocation Alter the Turbo Pascal heap Turbo C or MS fo For eee cane size when your program e
16. 30 day money back guarantee on unused items with intact seals Lori amp Nick s Enterprises 5 7 Bridge Street e Box 392 A Hillsboro New Hampshire 03244 The C Store Suite 277 487 East Main Street Mt Kisco NY 10549 0110 Reader Service Number 53 52 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 C CODE FOR THE PC source code of course C Source Code Bluestreak Plus Communications two ports programmer s interface terminal emulation 400 CQL Query System SQL retrievals plus windows 2 1 ee ee ee ee eee 325 GraphiC 4 1 high resolution DISSPLA style scientific plots in color amp hardcopy 325 Barcode Generator specify Code 39 alphanumeric Interleaved 2 of 5 numeric or UPC 300 Greenleaf Data Windows windows menus data entry interactive form design 295 Aspen Software PC Curses System V compatible extensive documentation 250 Vitamin C Mac Windows 60 6 3 aS EN we we Bh a Boe ea wl a we Ge 200 Essential resident C TSRify C programs DOS shared libraries 2 24 4 165 Essential C Utility Library 400 useful C functions 2 1 1 ee ee ee ee 160 Essential Communications Library C functions for RS 232 based communication systems 160 Greenleaf Communications Library interrupt mode modem control XON XOFF 150 Greenleaf Functions 296 useful C functions all DOS services 2 1 1 ee eee eee 150 OS 8
17. I XScale YScale Height Width YStart XStart readchar _ Process 4 Process 5 testwindow 81 exit 1 NextProcess 1 shiftwindow 2 params A B C D E F G H I nl write XStart A nl write XEnd B nl write XScale C n1 write YStart D nl write YEnd E nl write YScale F nl write Seed G nl write Lambda H nl write Step I nl NextProcess 1 NextProcess 2 shiftwindow 2 write Lambda readreal Lam Lam lt gt 0 params A B C D E F G retract params A B C asserta params A B C NextProcess 2 shiftwindow 2 write Invalid Lambda 0 NextProcess 3 shiftwindow 2 write Step readreal Inc Inc lt gt 0 params A B C D E F G H I retract params A B C D E asserta params A B C D E NextProcess 3 shiftwindow 2 write Invalid Step 0 NextProcess 4 shiftwindow 2 write XStart readreal XS params A B C D E F G H I XScale B XS XScale lt gt 0 retract params A B C D E F G H I asserta params XS B XScale D E F G H I NextProcess 4 shiftwindow 2 write Invalid X Scale 0 NextProcess 5 shiftwindow 2 write XEnd readreal XE params A B C D E F G H I XScale XE A XScale lt gt 0 retract params A B C D E F G H I asserta params A XE XScale D E F G H I NextProcess 5 shiftwindow 2 write Inv
18. Q Q c Q Q So c P e Q Q Q MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 11 Finally Affordable Intelligence TINY EINSTEIN The Expert System Shell e Create your own expert systems in minutes e With pulldown menus and windows Context sensitive online help Free example expert systems Tutorial Interactive full screen text editor DOS access from shell Turbo Fast execution Cluster Trace Explain For Diagnosing Simulating Predicting Planning Classifying Training and Monitoring systems Only 49 95 Plus 5 S H Designed amp implemented by Gary Entsminger amp Larry Fogg ak oe ACQUIRED INTELLIGENCE P O BOX 2091 DAVIS CA 95617 916 753 4704 Reader Service Number 72 12 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 Thus if P and Q are given c can be computed and so P2 c Q Pl P cx Q The number c which arises in the above computations has an importance of its own If Q is one of the standard unit vectors 1 0 0 0 1 0 or 0 0 1 then c is just the x y or z coordinate of P A situation may arise where you need to change your frame of reference If Q is one of the axis vectors in a non standard coordinate system the value c is the Q coordinate of P I like to think of Q as a measuring stick I call the process of extracting the number c calibrating P with respect to Q Turning These Ideas Into A Program Since I chose a
19. a integer var y integer and by replacing the ampersand amp by a semicolon 7 At the level of logic programming there is no direct translation into the pro cedural Pascal At this level Trilogy should be compared with Prolog Trilogy persons such that 1 no two persons share the same ini tial l 2 nobody has the initials BF 3 the last name of A is before the last name of B There are 3 3 factorial 6 possible combinations Notice that the only initials satisfying Figure 7 Truly Recursive Exponentiation in Trilogy proc Exp x lt I n lt 0 y gt I iff n gt 0 amp y x n if n 0 then y 1 else Exp x n 2 a amp a x n 2 if n mod 2 1 then y a a x else y a a end end END OF LISTING Figure 8 Generate amp Test in Prolog A d B e C f names A B C lt permute d e f A B C B lt gt f less A B less d e less d f less d f permute permute T H T2 lt delete H T T1 permute Tl T2 delete H H T T delete H H1 T H1 T1 lt delete H T T1 lt names A B C END OF LISTING Figure 9 Constraints in Trilogy The query is all Names a b c First Last AILBI C DIE F pred Names n First gt gt Last iff n B lt gt F amp n A lt n B END OF LISTING can deal with the same data structures as Prolog and can also perform backtrack ing to compute non determi
20. and we re into T2 We have an address and we know we ll be writing but where and what At the beginning of T2 SO S2 cause the 8288 to send a memory write MEMW com mand And finally the processor in itiates a data enable DEN again through the 8288 DEN enables the LS245 and DO through D7 chug out onto the data bus For most of the rest of the bus cycle we have a valid address valid data and an active MEMW Voila a complete memory write More Pins On the 8088 A16 through A19 are multiplexed with four more status sig nals The PC ignores 3 through S6 but they deserve at least a mention 3 and S4 provide information on which seg ment register is currently in use for data access S5 shows the status of the inter rupt enable flag and S6 does nothing Situations arise where a programmer needs to ensure that the bus won t be grabbed by another processor in the sys tem For example in a multiprocessor system several processors may share common resources data buffers per haps a printer In order to avoid conten tion each processor checks a semaphore before accessing the resource However since the exchange XCHG instruction used to inspect and update a semaphore does two memory accesses it would be possible for another processor to horn in between the two accesses and wreak havoc To guard against this problem we lock other processors out of the bus An assembly instruction prefix of lock
21. is the name TI gives to the loop instruction it stands for decrement skip jump not equal The instruction dsjne a6 fs_01 near the end of Figure 3 will be skipped Figure 2 34010 Fixed Point Multiplication and Division xPt equ 16 One equ 10000H fxMultiply Out a0 a0 al mpys al a0 sla 32 fxPt a0 srl fxPt al or al a0 rets fxDivide 7Out a0 a0 al move al a2 move a0 al define fixed point position jour representation of the number one 78igned integer multiplication line up high order bits line up low order bits combine them save divisor build dividend in 64 bit register swith fxPt shift sra 32 fxPt a0 sll xPt al divs a2 a0 rets END OF LISTING To get the fixed point result the in teger result must be right shifted 16 bits The 34010 doesn t have a double register shift instruction so separate shifts are done on each register Then the results are combined with an OR The shifts used provide 0 fill so the un used bits are effectively masked off The division instruction in the 34010 takes a 64 bit double register and divides it by a 32 bit divisor The quotient goes into a 32 bit register To avoid losing precision in the fixed point division routines the shift is done first then the division The dividend is left shifted 16 bits in the 64 bit register pair The sra instruction is a sign ex tending right shift The register pair is then
22. is__ of6is_ of7is__ of8is__ of 9is_ Feeling intelligent If so send us your method and solution in English or even better as machine intelligence in a program Meanwhile I forget the question For more information Johnson George Machinery Of The Mind A Tempus Book from Microsoft Press 1986 N _ TOOLKITS FOR EYY TURBO C amp QUICK C ie from ZORTECH INC A complete set of Terminate Stay Resident TSR functions that help you fo write reliable pop up programs Now you can make your programs Sidekickable Two example programs are included HOIR ZORTECH HOTKEY TOOLKIT SUPERTEXT This is not simply an Editor inmrnirommememusimanmwennennnnrevninnentit mae Turbo C is the trademark of Borland Inc Quick C is the trademark of MicroSoft Inc a pop up Calculator and a pop up Critical Error Handler The Hotkey toolkit handles all floating point functions in resident mode The 32 page manual includes an interesting discussion of the origin and history of undocumented MS DOS function calls together with a full explanation of the theory and practical use of TSR s Only 49 95 State Turbo C or Quick C version COMMS Do you need fo incorporate serial communications into your applications Yes Then get this inexpensive but highly professional COMMS toolkit from Zortech Inc Look at the list of features Xmodem Kermit an
23. lt I n lt 0 J a lt I y gt 1I iff comm n gt 0 amp y x n a if n 0 then yra else if n mod 2 1 then al x a else al a end amp Expl x x n 2 al y end END OF LISTING Figure 6 Proving Theorems Expl x 0 y y n gt 0 amp Expl x x n x a y gt Expl x 2 n tl a y n gt 0 amp Expl x x n a y gt Expl x 2 n a y END OF LISTING Denotational semanticists were cer tainly right By giving the evaluation predicate or relation Eval we specify the computations A program is mere data to the computing machine and generally doesn t have a meaning per se However after criticizing the machine approach most of the denotationalists proceeded to define a so called meaning function mapping programs into a com putational mechanism known as lambda calculus True the lambda functions pos sessed perfect meaning in the so called models of lambda calculus but the meaning function was nothing but the relation Eval in disguise The mistake of denotationalists was their belief that computations can be described by models instead of machines They have somehow forgotten that the notion of computability can be defined only through computing machines be it by the schemas of recursive functions or by Turing machines 24 MICROCORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 advantage over procedural languages in that they re free of side effects The com munication between programs is through para
24. meg populated RAM boards prices which are now probably below their current RAM cost Call these guys up and you ll probably hear either that they re out of stock have raised their prices or both How can you blame them I conclude that only about 20 of the RAM price increase we ve seen has been caused by the Yen dollar exchange ratio 50 is due to politically inspired production cuts in Japan and 30 is caused by opportunism by non Japanese suppliers James Bell SemiDisk Systems Inc P O Box GG Beaverton OR 97075 ALR AGE gt yay Ry EN NDIA By ASE TASTES GREA ei ii i 4 Illustration by Greg Cross You know a simple binary model would work beautifully for this species There s no doubt that applying bearcognition would be overkill THE Z88 UNDER 2 LBS A Computer Without Compromise Where laptops compromise on display and RAM capacity to achleve portability and desktops seem to equate price with power the 288 is a personal computer which makes no compromises A CMOS technology computer with the power to address 4 Mbytes of memory A computer with a work free display of 8 lines of 80 characters an LCD screen which outdates ail others and a unique dynamic page map on screen A computer with solid state permanent storage A computer with advanced word processing spreadsheet and Ingenious time and data management software bullt in A comput
25. more about that later I m set up well to check Gary s results I did And I came up with slightly different results Compiling with Turbo C version 1 0 and all optimizations on including 186 286 code generation using compact model I got 17 4 seconds for an 8 Mhz 186 and 8 2 not I repeat not 2 5 on the 286 I think I ve met the guy you bought your watch from Gary fortunately the tour guide warned me before I gave him any money Even after the inaccuracy is removed the result is still quite interesting The differences in the 186 vs 286 I mean I don t give a hoot about Prolog it s too hotsy totsy and high brow for me For that matter I don t give a hoot about standard deviations either The only reason I passed my Engineering Statistics class when I was in college was because my favorite CS instructor was teaching Stats that quarter due to a staff shortage A difference in timings between two lan guages on the same machine is explainable So is a difference in timing between two dif ferent processors But the 186 microcode is the same as the 286 the only immediately ob vious advantage that the 286 has is that it does memory accesses in 2 cycles compared to the 186 s 4 cycles But in an instruction mix with a high per centage of arithmetic instructions espe cially multiplies that shouldn t make much difference Somebody wanna trace through the code this sucker s tossin out I mi
26. ribly useful For example the hard coded places which execute interrupts and jumps are holdovers from MS DOS s early days when it tried to emu late CP M The same thing goes for the two FCB blocks FCBs have been sup planted by I O functions which use file handles The program in Figure 4 accesses what is generally the most useful item in the PSP the command tail begin ning at offset 81h DOS takes the com mand line which executed the program strips off the name of the program and stores the remainder in this area I O redirection and pipe operators lt gt and are also removed from the line before storage The length of the resulting string is stored in the PSP at offset 80h A carriage return not in cluded in the length terminates the string Accessing The Command Line Most programming languages sup port functions for accessing the com mand line C for example has argc ar gument count and argv an array of command line component strings which are passed to main as parameters Turbo Pascal has the ParamCount and ParamStr procedures While very useful these built in functions assume that items on the com mand line are separated by spaces and tabs Sometimes it s necessary to ex amine the command line directly pars ing it according to your own rules A word of warning certain DOS functions store the data they retrieve in a location known as the Disk Transfer Area or DTA
27. s normally used is in order Very short you can get that kind of information from any book about the IBM PC For example The Pink Shirt Book by that guy Norton By the way this discussion is going to be in assembly hex and binary and Turkish so all you pansies who only know how to program in 123 macros or shudder QuackBasic should go back to cutting paper dolls or turn on the Peewee Herman show for awhile INT 16h Services Through INT 16h the ROM BIOS provides client programs applications or operating systems with three func tions related to the keyboard get an input key check the availability of input and determine the pressed un pressed state of all shift type keys control alt etc These functions are accessed by ex ecuting an INT 16h instruction with AH set to a function code of 0 2 See Figure 1 for a more detailed description as well as examples of using each By the way I recommend that you always use the input services provided by DOS INT 21h function 6 7 and etc unless you really must have the extra informa tion provided by INT 16h ie scan codes shift status a prior knowledge of what the next key will be What we re going to talk about though is not how to use INT 16h but how to change it We want to change it so that it will translate certain keystrokes into different keystrokes for us Kind of like Superkey only friendlier to other programs not neces sarily to
28. s in the vicious rumor category jokes DeeDee Walsh In fact we re already using Medley in our office We re thinking of bundling it with PC File PC Type and PC Calc as a business package However no release date has yet been set for Medley and its three com panions Testing continues at Button Ware On The Road Again Jim Button is preparing another swing into Europe carrying the shareware message to more enthusiastic audiences The co inventor of the user supported software concept is at the peak of his form Keep on trucking Jim The Local Library The quickest source of shareware for the interested computer user continues to be the local users group software library or electronic bulletin board sys tem Look around ButtonWare is al ways nearby You can also obtain ButtonWare products directly via their toll free order line 1 800 JBUTTON The software prices listed above were cur rent as of February 1988 For more information on Jim Button and shareware check out David Thompson s interview in issue 37 of Micro Cornucopia Sept Oct 1987 Editor s note Micro C has the Button collection Disk MS45 contains PC File Version 1 0 with built in doc only MS46 contains PC Type MS47 contains the writ ing analyzer and dictionary MS48 contains PC Dial and PC Graph MS49 contains PC Calc and DOS helper and MS50 con tains the Calendar Reminder and a pair of Button Games Disks are 6 each pos
29. ve discussed over the past year Intel also added a number of new instructions The 286 took the 8086 family in another direction with the capability to create multi user and multi tasking sys tems It could generate a 24 bit address 16 MBytes though it remained a 16 bit processor A full 32 bits of address and data and 32 bit internal architecture make the 386 a true 32 bit processor As such it could deal with its entire address space four gigabytes as one contiguous block No more segments However it s quite happy in a segmented configuration like Intel s earlier processors The 8088 remains the most prevalent member of the family and we ll be con centrating on it But some of the discus sion will apply at least loosely to the other processors The 8088 Intel divides the 8088 into two major sections the execution unit EU and the bus interface unit BIU These units operate independently with the EU ex ecuting instructions while the BIU prefetches the next instructions and trans fers data to and from memory and I O space In rough terms the EU thinks and the BIU talks The EU is almost completely isolated from the rest of the system When the 8088 executes a program the BIU prefetches instructions from memory and loads them into the 8088 s 4 byte instruc tion queue The EU fetches instructions from the queue and executes them During execution of an instruction the BIU happily prefetches more instr
30. 0 00742 1129605 1129958 errors immediately on every sector We discovered that the controller s default step rate 70 5 usec was outside of the 25 50 usec range specified for the ST4026 We changed it to a smaller value 28 5 usec and reformatted the drive It has since worked perfectly for many hours Different controllers have different default step rates though 70 5 seems to be an oft used value The OMTI 5510 defaults to 15 usec according to its manual The Centan 5027 controller has a default step rate of 18 usec thinks Mark Miyakawa of NCL America Cen tan There should be a way to change the default step rate for any controller either through software or via jumpers on the board The step rate for the Western Digital WD 1002A WX1 controller is change able only through the formatting routine in its BIOS ROM Furthermore Qmax 11625 1130453 1130241 5 shows whole set 06707 3 11536 11339 ooorroc coe Figure 3 Step Rate Ranges for Seagate ST4000 Series Drives ST4026 ST4038 ST4051 ST4053 ST4096 Formatted Capacity MB 21 4 Step Rate Range usec 25 50 Step pulses issued between 50 usec and 3 msec may be lost Who needs em Using the WX1 controller we low level and DOS formatted three ST4026s In each case the drive appeared to operate normally until we attempted to copy over files With each drive 20 or fewer files went over fine followed by Seek Error Wr
31. 10mhz 109 00 AT 6 10 mhz 4 layer Choice of Phoenix or DTK Bios 350 00 XT Turbo 4 77 8 mhz PAES S PE EEEN 99 00 80386 8 16 mhz Award Bios amp 1MB RAM made in U S A 1595 00 For XT AT memory Call FLOPPY DISK DRIVES Fujitsu 360K ee ci lt casei ccecesk caress 89 00 Toshiba 360K c cecc cece ees 99 00 Teac 1 2 MB 0 cece cece cece ees 125 00 Toshiba 34 Drive Kit 720K 125 00 Toshiba 34 Drive 1 44mb 145 00 KEYBOARDS 5339 Professional XT AT w 12 function key 4 5 69 00 5060 Keyboard AT Style 55 00 KB101 Keytronic 006 67 00 Free Instructions with Each System DEPEND ON MICROSPHERE We ve been building computer equipment for 4 years The components and products we sell are chosen specifically because they have been Proven in our own use and testing We guarantee our cards will be compatible when purchased all together Reader Service Number 2 80386 KIT Includes 8 16 mhz 1MB RAM 1 360K floppy drive 1 1 2 MB FD 1 40MB HD Award bios switchable keyboard monochrome monitor mono graphics Serial parallel ports case power supply game port clock calendar Main board made in U S A 2675 00 80286 AT KIT Includes K RAM 1 2 MB FD 1 360K floppy drive and 40 MB Seagate St 251 hard drive 6 10mhz serial parallel and game ports clock calendar AT style keyboard
32. 22 Call for prices of other brands HGC compat mono card 55 RS232 2 port card 35 3 MB Multifunction card 125 Lap Top Kits 799 20MB Hard Disk Kit 289 Color graphic card 49 4 serial port card 95 2MB Expansion card 125 AC power center Wein hie 25 30MB Hard Disk Kit 319 EGA Paradise 159 Game I O card 15 Multi I O card 59 AC power strips 15 ST 225 0 cece ee ee eens 219 i 384k Multifunction card 69 Locking slide case 65 sap file a EET A ST 238 cece eee eoee 249 Easydata int 300 1200 79 FCC app slide XT case 29 200W power supply 79 rinter or serial cable ST 4038 00e00es pete Taiheho external 3 12 105 MOUSE 150W power supply 55 Enhanced keyboard 59 386 16MHz 2MB 1599 ST 251 40MB 429 Everex 2400 externat 195 Logimouse C7 75 XT keyboard 49 WD HD floppy controller 149 Reader Service Number 42 Prices subject to change without notice MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 65 John P Jones 6245 Columbia Ave St Louis MO 63139 314 645 1596 A Pascal Debugger For Programmers Who Are Less Than Perfect There s a debugger for C So what There are lots of debuggers for C How about a debugger for Pascal It s a commercial debugger but at 45 it sounds like a steal t s April 14 and you ve just finished your 15 000 line Turbo
33. 225 KIT FOR XT 20 MEG 259 ST 238 KIT FOR XT RLL 30 MEG 279 ST 251 FOR AT 40 MEG 405 MONITORS Color Monitor RGB CGA 255 Color Monitor RGB EGA 3955 Monochrome TTL Green 95 Monochrome TTL Amber 95 EGA Color Video Card 129 CITIZEN PRINTERS 120D 120 CPS 9 180D 180 CPS 9 MSP 15E 160 CPS 15 MSP 40 240 CPS 9 MSP 45 240 CPS 15 MSP 50 300 CPS 9 MSP 55 300 CPS 15 Communication Protocols When a communication program at tempts to transfer a large amount of data for instance a file over a serial link it runs a risk It s not unusual for noise or other problems to change bits as they sail across the line For file transfer to be de pendable the transfer program must be able to 1 determine whether there s an error and if so 2 correct it Most file transfer protocols FIPs break files up into blocks or packets This way you don t need to retransmit an en tire file if there s an error Data is usually surrounded by infor RARAARRRAR CASCADE ELECTRONICS INC ROUTE 1 BOX 8 RANDOLPH MN 55065 507 645 7997 Please ADD Shipping on all Orders COD Add 3 00 Credit Cards ADD 5 Limited to Stock on Hand Subject to change Reader Service Number 15 34 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 mation which says a packet s coming this is it s number here s the data Finally some sort of check value is sent One of the earliest microcomputer protocols is Ward Ch
34. 27512 AND ee AND TESTED BURNED IN WITH MANUAL 169 WITH JUST A or SAME AS ABOVE PROGRAMMER BUT PROGRAMS 8 UNITS AT ONE Digital Research Computers P O BOX 381450 DUNCANVILLE TX 75138 214 225 2309 TERMS Add 3 00 postage We pay balance Orders under 15 add 75 handling No C O D We accept Visa and MasterCard Texas Res add 6 1 4 Tax Foreign orders except Canada add 20 P amp H Orders over 50 add 85 for insurance Reader Service Number 32 Reader Service Number 87 hh 110 0 1 010 By Gary Entsminger 1912 Haussler Dr Davis CA 95616 Chaos Butterflies And The Borland Graphics Interface BGI The whole AI field probably appears chaotic Well chaos describes lots of things more things than you might believe ost of us believe perhaps intuitively that if we know the initial value of a variable say X and the function that describes how it changes in time we can predict the future value of the variable at any time Consider the equation XNext R X where X is the variable and R describes its rate of change If we assume that each NextX is the X of the next equation in other words if we feed each XNext back into the equation as its new seed or X then If R gt 1 XNext will always increase until at some infinite time XNext will grow to be in finitely large And if R lt 1 XNext will decrease until at some infinite time it will a
35. 32 Bit Super Chips 256 K RAM For Your 83 Kaypro Julia Sets Programming The 32032 PC DOS For Non Clones Desktop Graphics Modula II 104 pages ISSUE 35 4 87 Designing a PC Workstation Board ISSUE 18 6 84 RS 232C The Interface SOLD OUT Around The TMS 3410 Kaypro EPROM Programmer 104 pages 96 pages U0 Byte A Primer Kaypro Joystick Senn To Parallel Interface ISSUE 40 3 88 Business COBOL The Great C Issue 60 pages 11 C Compilers BACK ISSUES OF MICRO C e ISSUE 19 8 84 C An Object Oriente Adding Wincrestes To BBII Source Level Debugger for Turbo C 6 MHz On the BBI 96 pages Bulletin Boards Track Buffering On Slicer 4 MES Vor Tue 9201 U S Canada amp Mexico P et Issues 1 34 cee eeee eee eeeeeeee 3 00 each ppd Hee eaten ae n Issues 35 through current issue 3 95 each ppd DynaDisk For The BBII Serial Printer On BBI Sans S10 Cheap amp Dirty Talker For Ka i ir il Exterided 8 Single Density Foreign air mail 72 pages Issues 1 through current issue 7 00 each ppd Advertisers Index Issue 41 Reader 07 CompuView 12 Logitech Inc Programmer s Paradise Service Lori and Nick s Enterprises 52 Project Data Systems 90 Dair Computer Systems Scientific Software 72 Acquired Intelligence 08 Datadesk Int l 17 Manx Software Systems 77 Serengeti Software 44 Amtech Computers 32 Digital Research Computers 81 42 McTek Systems Sharp s Inc 38 AnalogicCompany 35 Merlin Pub
36. 7 on Saturday 9 00 5 amp Call NOW 408 732 1573 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 21 The Logic Of Programming Languages Proving The Compiler Paul s an academic He needs to prove that something will work before he creates it After he carefully made the point that he could prove mathematically that Trilogy works I asked him to do an article on prov ing languages in general Here it is quence of symbols used to control a machine The symbols can be charac ters on a sheet of paper holes punched into cardboard bits in a computer a se quence of keystrokes etc The computing machine can be a human performing computations on a sheet of paper an automatic loom con trolled by a Jacquard card an electronic computer or a hand held calculator We can use a mathematical conjecture called the Church Thesis to capture the meaning of programs for a specific com puting machine by means of a comput able relation a broad sense a program is a se Eval p i 0 where p is a suitable encoding of a program i is an input to the machine and o is the output The relation Eval p i o holds if and only if the machine obeys the instructions of p by consuming the data i and halting with the output o Our programming languages are based on variables which are used in ex pressions which are part of statements which are grouped into subroutines The relation Eval defining the mean ing of a prog
37. C Issue 41 disk The disk is 6 00 for U S subscribers 8 00 for everyone else ppd To order use the prepaid order form in this magazine or call 1 800 888 8087 It either reports any discrepancies or pronounces the file healthy As with VIEW you can specify the file to be checked on the command line If you forget or fail to do so the program asks Note the use of define and ifdef to control conditional compilation If WordStar isn t used there s obviously no point in looking for S s and B s Simply omit or comment out the line define WORDSTAR This will ensure that the code between each ifdef WORDSTAR and its terminating endif won t be compiled You can easily compile two different versions of PAIR one with WORDSTAR defined for checking your word processing files and one with WORDSTAR not defined for checking your C program source files Either way each character fetched from the input file is tested using a switch statement A series of if else if else if else if tests could have been used instead but the switch statement produces more efficient code Note that the counting variables rparen Iparen etc are declared global ly outside the main function while ch is declared locally The Small C com piler generally produces more efficient code fetching and retrieving global vari ables than it does with locals Except for the last two local variables declared They
38. CE CF A incons fail reinf X Y 2 A lt var X inf X Y Z A reinf X Z A lt var inf Y X 2 A rcinf X Y Z A lt var Z in f 2 X Y A rcinf X Y Z incons lt X Y Z lt gt 1 inf 1 Y Z inferred lt nonvar Y nonvar Z Y 0 Z 0 inf 0 Y 0 inferred lt nonvar Y Y 1 inf 0 0 Y Y inferred lt nonvar Y Y 1 inf _ Y Z incons lt nonvar Y nonvar Z Y 1 2 1 END OF LISTING problems with millions of possibilities in Prolog Not only are the programs un readable but any connection to logic is lost Such programs can be explained only in a procedural way by a sequence of changes to bindings of variables Once again a relation Eval is the only way to assign meaning to Prolog programs Why The Logic Was Lost Both Lisp and Prolog were originally designed as nice and tidy languages standing firmly on mathematical founda tions Lisp was designed by McCarthy at MIT Prolog was designed by Col merauer at Marseilles Unfortunately neither of the designers watched closely over the implementations In a dubious quest for quick efficien cy the implementers at MIT Lisp and in Marseilles as well as in Edinburgh Prolog added features to both lan guages The features increased the efficiency but unfortunately added the euphemisti cally called meta logical features In plain English the logic of Lisp and Prolog is gone Both languages are mere
39. DOS 3 21 they execute exactly the same code no one knows Function 62h is documented while 51h is not But 62h is only available in DOS 3 x or higher Function 51h worked in my tests for DOS versions 2 1 and later To access the PSP a program should define a far pointer to a structure or record in Pascal which is formatted like the PSP Then using the PSP segment and an offset of 0 the pointer can be as signed to address the PSP data area Figure 4 shows this technique using Turbo C It will display the command tail contained in the PSP Figure 4 Accessing The Program Segment Prefix include stdio h include dos h extern unsigned psp declare the psp variable define the PSP structure struct PSP char void far void far void far unsigned int unsigned char unsigned int char unsigned char char 1111 10 old INT 22 old_INT 23 old INT 24 parent_seg handles 20 environ_seg 1112 82 tail len emd_tail 127 declare a pointer to a PSP structure struct PSP far PSPdata main unsigned char i make a far pointer to the PSP PSPdata struct PSP far MK FP _psp 0 print the command tail for i 0 i lt PSPdata gt tail_len i putchar PSPdata gt cmd_tail i with a final CR putchar n As you can see my structure doesn t define every field in the PSP Some of the information in the PSP just isn t ter
40. In all the BGI includes 70 or more predicates for drawing dots lines rec tangles arcs circles 3 d bars text and so on in various line widths and fonts It s by far the most complete graphics toolbox I ve used and is a big improve ment over the Turbo Prolog and early Turbo Pascal graphics routines I haven t had a chance yet to compare the Turbo Prolog BGI with Turbo Pascal 4 0 or Turbo C 1 5 BGIs but I expect they re very similar The code on the bulletin board uses a linemenu from the Prolog Toolbox but you can use the vertical menu supplied with Turbo Prolog instead Just sub stitute menu for linemenu and omit the tpreds tdoms and linemenu in clude files For more information about BGI Borland International 4585 Scotts Valley Dr Scotts Valley CA 95066 For more info about Chaos Gleick James Chaos Making A New Science 1987 Viking Hofstadter Douglas Metamagical Themas Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern 1985 Basic Books May Robert M Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics Nature Vol 261 June 10 1976 And that s Tidbits If you want to set a driver w o detecting it use the following 2 lines instead of the previous 5 assert driver 7 7 HercMono InitGraph 7 0 _ bgi_Path ToText closegraph KeepColor 1 _ 0 KeepColor _ Mode Mode GetDriverName 0 Detect GetDriverName
41. MATE is a trademark of Phoenix Technologies Ltd Norton trademark of UnderWare Inc Editor is a trademark of Peter Norton Computing Inc Demo Disk is fully functional but does not readily write large files Reader Service Number 7 PROGRAMMABLE 1 EDITOR FREE Fully Functional Demo Disk Call for 286 XENIX Version Fully Network Compatible e Simultaneously edit up to 37 files of unlimited size e Split the screen into variable sized windows e Virtual disk buffering simplifies editing of large files e Memory management supports up to 640K e Execute DOS commands or other programs e MS DOS pathname support e Horizontal scrolling edit long lines e Flexible cut and paste with 36 scratch pad buffers e Customization determine your own keyboard layout create your own editing functions support any screen size e Optimized for IBM PC XT AT Color windows 43 line EGA EASY TO USE e Interactive on line help is user changeable and expandable e On line integer calculator also algebraic expressions e Single key search and global or selective replace e Pop up menus for easy access to many editing functions e Keystroke macros speed editing hot keys for menu functions FOR PROGRAMMERS e Automatic Indent Undent for C PL I PASCAL etc e Match check nested parentheses i e and for C e Automatic conversion to upper case for assembly language
42. Megabytes On DSI 32 Practical Programming In Modula 2 Designing A Database Part 2 Interface to Electronic Typewriter Low Intensity BBI Video SOG IV Unblinking The PC s Blinkin Cursor Interrupts On The PC BBI Video Size Turbo Pascal The Early Days The Future Of Computing Game Theory In PROLOG and C Hacker s View Of MS DOS Vs 3 X Video Jitter Fix 80 pages MS DOS In The Public Domain 104 pages Digital To Analog Conversion A Slicer Column Begins Graphics In Turbo Pascal Designer s View Kaypro Color Graphics Review ISSUE 22 2 85 104 pages 96 pages pag Xerox 820 II To A Kaypro 8 ISSUE 32 10 86 Sound Generator For The STD Bus ISSUE 27 12 85 Public Domain 32000 ISSUE 37 9 87 ISSUE 15 12 83 Reviews Of 256K RAM Expansion SOLD OUT Hardware and Software Desktop Publishing On A PC _ Screen Dump Listing In The Public Domain Begins Writing A Printer Driver For MS DOS Build Your Own Hi Res Graphics Fixing Serial Ports 88 pages Recover A Directory By Scanner For 6 00 Part 1 Playing Adventure ISSUE 28 2 86 Reading amp Writing Disk Sectors Designing A Database Part 3 SBASIC Column Begins Pascal Runoff Winners 96 pages Controlling AC Power From Your PC Upgrading Kaypro I to 4 ISSUE 23 4 85 f Rescuing Lost Text From Memory Expanded Memory On The PC XT AT Upgrading Kaypro 4 to 8 Automatic Disk Relogging Introduction To Modula 2 Uninterruptible Power Supply For rs ages Interrupt Drive Serial Printer First Look At Amiga ISSUE 33 12 86 RAMdisk
43. OS ONE operating system uses MS DOS disks with source code Free newsletter amp spec sheets HAWTHORNE TECHNOLOGY 1411 S E 31st Ave Portland OR 97214 503 232 7332 Reader Service Number 34 SCREEN MANAGER MENU WINDOW and DATA ENTRY Support for the Professional Programmer Interfaces to most languages BASIC C FORTRAN COBOL PASCAL ASSEMBLER 100 Page Manual 30 oy money back guarantee o Royalties from The West Chester Group 79 P O Box 1304 West Chester PA 19380 VISA MC 215 644 4206 CALL FOR FREE DEMO CIRCLE 279 ON READER SERVICE CARD Reader Service Number 78 35 mm SLIDES FROM 46 8 591530 0 Om z Computer Slide Express Finally a one day service to convert your graphic files into 4000 line color slides from your disk for 9 or less Visual Horizons 180 Metro Park Rochester N Y 14623 716 424 5300 Reader Service Number 79 16 Megabytes EMS and or Extended Memory eWorks on 8 or 16 bit bus e16 bit transfer on AT bus Single board design includes RAM disk and extensive diagnostics eQuantity OEM discounts Designed No eee Manufactured p Gi Sold and Serviced by Tu 904 North 6th St Lake City MN 55041 612 345 4555 Reader Service Number 54 TurboCAD The New Generation CAD pace 395 XT and AT Compatible Milan Systems America Inc 8351 Roswell Road Dunwoody GA 30350 404 642 4931 MONEY BACK GUA
44. Paradise will match any current nation aly advertised price for the products listed in this ad rices and Policies subject to change without notice Hours 9AM EST 7PM EST 5 We ll Match any Nationally Advertised Price Mail Oraers include your phone number Ask for details Some returns once disk seals are broken gt manufacturers will not allow Dealers and Corporate Buyers Call for special discounts and benefits 445 7899 In NY 914 332 4548 Customer Service 914 332 0869 _ International Orders 914 332 4548 _ Telex 510 601 7602 Reader Service Number 68 A Division of Hudson Technologies Inc 42 River Street Tarrytown NY 10591 TAPE Ae ald Au Graphics In 3 D Ray Tracing On The 34010 Part 1 8 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 Fe ce I ORR aap al aM AA ts ap testa hme r re pt Ad din pg os a rf a abn Pi The 34010 is the fastest smartest most gung ho video controller ever devised at least by TI Since it s so smart and fast it may as well help with the chores chores like creating 3 D images Here s part one of a very significant two part series hile ray tracing provides the motivation and examples the principles that follow apply to any three dimensional computer gra phic program I ll supply 34010 assembly language code which implements the geometric principles Some if then conditions will help you navigate through th
45. SPINDRIFT LIBRARY Collection of 150 callable subroutines for Fortran that provides access to WINDOWS DOS KEYBOARD and SCREEN The windowing system allows an unlimited number of windows to be defined on the screen each having its own color cursor position and border type Supports automatic wrap and or scrolling List 149 Special Price 129 PANEL PLUS Screen management library for data display entry and editing Supports pop up fields and windows multi line fields horizontal and vertical field scrolling menus help boxes and custom field validation List 495 Special Price 389 MKS RCS Revision Control System manages multiple revisions of text files and program sources code on DOS systems Storage retrieval tracking and branching text files are effectively managed List 189 Intro Price 169 eine Neca Programmer s Paradise Gives You Superb Selection Personal Service and Unbeatable Prices Welcome to Paradise The microcomputer software source that caters to your programming needs Discover the Many Advantages of Paradise AZATAR DOS TOOLKIT NEW 9 85 o Lowest price guaranteed o Huge inventory immediate shipment o Special orders DOSBIO TE MOUSE TOOLS E Latest versions Knowledgeable sales staff 30 day money back guarantee METRABYTE DATA ACQ TOOLS 100 89 s SYSTEM BUILDER 150 129 Over 500 brand name products in stock if you don t see it call IM
46. TEST EQUIPMENT OSCILLOSCOPES Phillips 3260E 120 MHz Dual TEK 7403N 7A18N 7B50A 60MHz TEK 455 50 MHz Dual Trace ANALYZERS TEK 491 10MHz 40 GHz Nicolet 500A 1 Hz 0 100 KHz Biomation 805 Waveform Anlyzr 259 00 DBASE BOOK OF BUSINESS APPLICATIONS by Michael J Clifford Reg 19 95 NowonLy 3 95 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 69 Letters Continued from page 6 So when you linked routines from C and assembler you had the eight character limit due to the assembler not the C compiler The author states that this limita tion name length of one C compiler extends to all C compilers if you want portability I ve tried to port 8086 as sembly code from MASM to Aztec and other 8086 assemblers They don t all work the same so we have a similar problem with assembly language The code generated from his ex ample obviously comes from an older compiler without any optimization The jmp to a label on the next line always gets removed by even simple peephole optimizers The chkstk code in MSC may be dis abled during compile This makes the code to call a function smaller But I ve found chkstk to be a wonderful aid during debugging Stack problems can be notoriously difficult to find especial ly in code dealing with many interrupts I use assembly for speed and C for portability and readability Code is often maintained by another person than the author and my experience has been tha
47. The initial DTA address is set to offset 80h within the PSP right where the command tail is stored The FCB file and the directory search functions use the DTA Very very few compilers use the FCB functions for file I O preferring the more flexible and modern handle I O functions intro duced with DOS version 2 If you do use a function which puts its data in the DTA such as the directory search func tions 4Eh and 4Fh use function 1Ah to set a new DTA address or save the command tail in your own buffer MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 51 The C Store EVERYTHING FOR THE C PROGRAMMER PLUS tree SorTware LATTICE C COMPILER Ver 3 2 229 The classic DOS development environment MICROSOFT C COMPILER Ver 5 0 Innovative CodeView debugger make more 269 TURBO C COMPILER Ver 1 5 69 Fast full development environment bargain INSTANT C INTERPRETER Ver 3 0 Instant linking execution and debugging Directly link Microsoft Lattice libraries 379 C TERP C INTERPRETER Ver 3 0 229 Virtual memory support versions for all compilers PC LINT Ver 2 10 99 Shake out C bugs before compiling neat PANEL PLUS Ver 1 0 w source Complete screen I O development no royalty 379 WINDOWS FOR C Ver 4 14 WINDOWS FOR DATA Ver 2 06 Flexible fast high quality windowing system 149 229 GREENLEAF LIBRARIES Functions Ver 3 10 Communications Ver 2 10 Data Windows Ver 2 10 Data Windo
48. XD extends the standard Users Disks contain the password access to foreign databases DOS commands At any time yatl can view famou S Buttonware and over 64 0000 records per database a menuo XD commands which 2s Note PC File has on screen help You _include killing entire subdirectories string collection This IS can get more complete documentation by search through multiple files file attribute shareware and we registering with Buttonware and time date editing and more encourage you to MS46 PC Type MS50 PC Tickle and Button Games s Another great Buttonware product Organize your life Schedule events keep r egister if you find the Macros mail merge and multiple file track of tasks balance your checkbook software useful We editing capabilities make this text editor even follow your caloric input and output c rade vou t compete favorably with commercial Includes its own mini editor 9190 GN 94 ag y ds o eaters And lest things should get too serious we share copies of this Documentation exists in the form of finish the Buttonware Collection with two extensive help files along with more brief adventure games Become the main software with other PC context sensitive help screens character in a South American Trek or a Castaway adventure owners MS47 PC Style and Dictionary aa a NE Buttonware s PC Style analyzes your writing for readability personal tone and action Find out if your sentences and words are to
49. XScale YScale Height Width yStart XStart Y X 1 X Yl yY 2 Row Height Y1 YStart YScale Height Col Count XStart XScale Width shiftwindow 3 write YStart YStart write X Count write Y 1 write Col Col write Row Row nl putpixel Col Row 7 Newcount Count I XEnd XScale XStart Newcount lt XEnd _ Iterate_Trace Y1 L Newcount I XScale YScale Height Width yStart XStart Draw parabola to scale Function I X Height Width XScale YScale L XStart YStart YouLu xX 1 X Row Height Y YStart YScale Height Col X XStart XScale Width NextXRel X I XEnd XScale XStart NextXRel lt XEnd putpixel Col Row 7 function I NextXRel Height Width XScale YScale L XStart YStart function Main makewindow 1 7 0 0 0 25 80 makewindow 2 7 0 2 0 12 80 makewindow 3 7 0 22 0 3 80 Main_menu Main_menu linemenu 0 18 0 Parameters Function Iterate Trace Quit C Process C ToText Testwindow 81 Main_menu Testwindow N existwindow N shiftwindow N removewindow Testwindow N Process 1 linemenu 1 103 0 Show Lambda Step XStart XEnd YStart YEnd C NextProcess C testwindow 81 Process 1 Process 2 Initialize ClearDevice SetColor 1 Set current color to white Set
50. a keypress or some other hardware event Resetting the interrupt flag disables these interrupts The CLI and STI instructions take care of clearing resetting and setting this flag Finally the trap flag causes the 8088 to generate an interrupt after execution of each instruction This flag allows a debugger to single step through your code in search of those nasty glitches See Micro C s Issue 40 C Column for more on debuggers The Real Brains If you want to isolate one part of the 8088 that really has some smarts it s the ALU Everything else supports this one section The ALU performs all arithmetic operations and logical comparisons Most of us like to think of assembly programming as the bottom line But how does the ALU know what to do with an instruction Microcode Microcode isn t little tiny code writ ten by stunted programmers The folks at Intel use microcode to translate the com plex set of object instructions into the much smaller set the hardware under stands Bus Interface Unit The rest of the registers segment registers and the instruction pointer a 20 bit address generator the instruction queue and bus control logic live in the BIU The BIU has three main tasks First it prefetches instructions from memory in an attempt to always have instructions waiting in the instruction queue Execu tion speed increases dramatically if the EU doesn t have to wait while its next in struction
51. ae MS DOS A far call to the MS DOS function dispatcher equivalent to a an INT 21h revious INT 22h DOS Terminate address aS th Previous INT 23h CTRL BREAK address The previous INT 24n Critical Error egment of Piat progran UNDOCUMENTED MS os file handle table UNDOCUMENTED gment of this progran s copy of the o ironment UNDOCUMENTED oe Be Unknown Reserved by MS DOS lh and far RET instructions This is definitely NOT a recommended way of accessing INT 21h o Unknown Reserved by MS DOS fault File Control Block FCB number 1 MS DOS parses the first command line parameter into this area making the _atsumption that teaa a e name Default File Control Block FCB number 2 MS DOS parses the first command line _ parameter into this area making the assumption that it s a file name Both this oe and FCB 1 are hold overs fron CP M a The length of the omand line tail Not that this area is also the paginiing the eraut Data Transfer Area DTA ome tail of the command line used hen thi program was executed MS DOS makes some _ changes to it see text Also note that this area gets overwritten as part of th DTA unless the DTA is moved elsewhere ED OF LISTING ing the first MCB in versions 2 11 3 1 and 3 2x of MS DOS Several programs most notably the public domain MAPMEM from Turbo Power Software examine the cha
52. amp high density or 3 2 drive xx x Special x x x 350 00 MatchPoint PC by MicroSolutions The MatchPoint PC board for the PC XT AT works with your standard controller card to let you read and write to NorthStar hard sector and Apple It diskettes on your PC INCLUDES a copy of the UniForm PC program as well as utilities to format disks copy delete and view files on Apple DOS PRODOS and Apple CP M diskettes MatchPoint PC Board 169 95 MatchMaker by MicroSolutions Now you can copy your Macintosh diskettes right on your PC XT AT with the MatchMaker Just plug your external Macintosh drive into the MatchMaker board and experience EASY access to your 3v2 Mac diskettes Includes programs to read write initialize and delete files on your single or double sided Mac diskettes 139 95 325 00 Frustrated because your PC can t speak CP M UniDOS by Micro Solutions Run CP M programs on your PC Of course UniDOS is a memory resident program that can use the NEC V20 CPU chip to actually RUN your favorite 8080 programs Use UniDOS with UniForm PC and automatically switch to CP M mode as you log on your CP M diskette Switch to emulation mode to run Z80 code programs or for systems without a V20 UniDOS directly converts video and keyboard emulation for Kaypro Xerox 820 Morrow Osborne VT100 and eight other displays All standard CP M system calls are supported Note The NEC V20 CPU is a fast low power CMOS replacement for the 8
53. and drive the hardware directly Link these functions directly to your application or install them as memory resident Blaise Computing products include all source code that is efficiently crafted readable and easy to modify Accompanying each package is an indexed manual describing each procedure and function in detail with example code fragments Many complete examples and useful utilities are included on the diskettes The documentation examples and source code reflect the attention to detail and commitment to y technical support that have distinguished Blaise Computing over the years Designed explicitly for Turbo Pascal 4 0 Turbo POWER TOOLS PLUS and Turbo ASYNCH w 5 Send PLUS provide reliable fast professional routines YES eats Cc the right combination of pieces to put your Turbo Pascal En ease Sen puzzle together Complete price is 129 00 each i rai residents C N 1 UPS shipp rane tA Addres ess BLAISE COMPUTIN GINC ioy 2560 Ninth Street Suite 316 Berkeley CA 94710 415 540 5441 Szer n ey Reader Service Number 5 eee C Vs Assembly Language One This letter is in response to the article C vs Assembly Language in Micro C issue 40 On the whole I agree with Mr Isaacson s assertion that a program is more efficient when written in assembly language than in any other language Additionally I agree it can take less time to develop the assembly language program than the C vers
54. and prices to any other intelligent graphics board Then choose the PC Tech Color 34010 Video Processor for your development engine and your production requirements as well Color 34010 Video Processor 1 195 00 Price includes 512K display RAM 1024K program RAM and utility software Monitor not included Also available DGIS 34010 C compiler assembler 34010 fractal software additional display and program memory and various monitor options PC Tech Monochrome 34010 Video Processor and Monitor e 736 x 1024 resolution other options available e 2 bits per pixel for 4 hardware gray shades e Hardware support for CGA MDA Hercules emulation e PC XT and AT compatible e Full page 66 line text editing with many popular editors e Excellent windows 2 0 application development system The graphics and bit manipulation capabilities of the TMS 34010 make the PC Tech Monochrome 34010 Video Processor 66 line full page text and graphics display faster than many 25 line systems The video processor is available separately or with the high resolution white phosphor monitor shown above Monochrome 34010 Video Sub System 1 295 00 Price includes Monochrome Video Processor and monitor pictured above Also available DGIS TI 34010 C compiler TI assembler Monochrome 34010 Video Processor also available separately 3 P SOG SPECIAL PC Tech will offer a 10 SOG DISCOUNT on all Designed Sold and Serviced By 34010 ba
55. any time otherwise you can up date to the current version for 20 Performance with Optimum C 3 14 has im proved especially in the area of floating point calculations Code size has increased just slight ly approx 200 bytes from version 3 12 I still don t recommend this compiler to beginners poor documentation but an expert can t go wrong with Optimum C Borland Turbo C v1 5 I mentioned Turbo C v1 5 in the review pointing out that you would see it by the time the review appeared in print True enough Turbo C 1 5 has ar rived and it looks good An object module librarian and a GREP utility are now included The compiler itself hasn t changed much in fact it generates slightly larger 800 1000 bytes ex ecutables than before due to an increase in the size of some library modules One surprising difference is in the speed of disk access where the time with version 1 5 is 25 more than with 1 0 All Borland languages Turbo C Turbo Pascal etc support a graphics library called the Borland Graphics Interface or BGI It supports nearly every PC graphics adapter I ve heard of including Hercules and EGA cards It can automatically sense which type of adapter is installed allowing you to write programs which will run on mul tiple adapters Mix Power C This compiler is being heavily adver tised as a competitor to both Turbo C and MSC In the past MIX has produced a non standard compiler
56. as soon as one released the constraint of the modem there was no reason to use the lines as if they were talking to a modem Since no standard existed on how to use the lines for non modem purposes designers used them as they saw fit and the RS 232C NON standard was born So when you connect a device to your computer s RS 232 port chances are COMPUTER DTE COMPUTER DTE it won t work Either your computer or your device or both do not use the standard as it was originally intended The biggie is this the transmit line of the terminal was meant to be connected to the transmit line of the modem and the receive line to the modem receive line When the terminal became a PC and the modem was replaced by say a printer some bright printer designer realized that the printer was actually receiving the data which the computer was sending so the TRANSMIT line of the computer should go to the RECEIVE line of the printer and the TRANSMIT line of the printer should go to the RECEIVE line of the computer Data wise the standard computer to modem cable wouldn t work Hardware Handshaking Another insidious line is Clear To Send CTS Printers and other devices which are much slower than a computer need some way of saying wait I ve received enough I ll let you know when I need more This pause can be handled in hardware or in software The hardware method usually uses the CTS line When the
57. available STAGE2 PC the PC version of the mainframe macro processor STAGE2 Disk plus printed manual only 49 95 plus 3 P amp H Florida residents add 6 sales tax Soft Tel Inc P O Box 5116 Lighthouse Pt FL 33074 305 942 6671 Reader Service Number 92 94 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 Periscope Debugging Systems for IBM Personal Computers FREE INFORMATION 800 722 7006 The 1197 PEACHTREE ST PERIS PLAZA LEVEL ATLANTA GA 30361 Company Inc 404 875 8080 Reader Service Number 94 Cross Assemblers Universal Linker Librarian PC MS DOS micro VAX VAX VMS VAX UNIX ULTRIX hosted on Targeting over 30 microprocessors Enertec inc 215 362 0966 19 Jenkins Ave Lansdale PA 19446 Reader Service Number 82 PC C SHELL A faithful implementation of the Berkeley Unix C Shell for MS DOS Full History Syntax Looping Statements while foreach Shell Variables and Arrays Cursor Key Command Line Editor Runs as default command processor WORKS ON ANY MS DOS COMPUTER 50 00 Omega MicroConsulting 722 Rundell Street Iowa City IA 52240 319 338 6053 Reader Service Number 77 ATRON HARDWARE DEBUGGER Hardware breakpoints source level debugging e Includes performance analysis software 4K hardware trace buffer external break switch AT Source Probe has imb onboard memory invisible to DOS Currently ret
58. available for onl Our Guarantee Try the Eco C88 compiler for 99 95 Use it for 30 days and if you are not completely satisfied simply return it for a full refund We are confident that once you ve tried Eco C88 you ll never use anything else Call or write today Reader Service Number 9 86 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 rate range This may require setting the step rate on the controller to a non default value Otherwise the drive may operate unreliably or not at all Our experience has been limited to problems with the recently discon tinued ST4026 together with the ubiq uitous Western Digital WD1002A WX1 controller The ST4026 has the nar rowest step rate range of all of this family of drives 25 50 usec The WX1 defaults to a step rate of 70 5 usec which is too slow for this drive and possibly too slow for its siblings as well See Figure 3 Seagate says that voice coil drives typically have a narrow step rate win dow Seagate s stepper motor drives do in fact have much larger windows typi cally 5 200 usec ST225 The ST4026 OEM Manual says that step rates between 25 and 50 usec and above 3 msec are supported but that Figure 2 Fractal Parameters Mandelbrot Sets Pmin Pmax Qmin 0 74877 0 0 7454716 0 0 74554433 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1091 5 0148 23333 10511 11196 I ooorrOoOCS Julia Sets P Q 0 32 0 043 0 39054 0 58679 0 27334
59. base of a genuine operating system reliably distinct from the facade created by an MSDOS interface All 2 2 system and CBIOS calls are supported 56 5k TPA file date and time stamping fast virtual disk iobyte redirection ter minal emulation color console display auto relog COM path SAVE anywhere single key phrase recall built in ac cess to DOS drives SETDISK redefines a drive to any of over 80 CP M formats System disk with manual 129 Shipping 5 10 nonUS Ze GS A 118 SW First St Box G Warrenton OR 97146 503 861 1765 Mere ethods Inc John J Newlin 4060 228 Rosenda Court San Diego CA 92122 From Our Foreign Correspondent I don t often get mail from Hong Kong but Micro C has readers there One of them is a shareware author named John Scofield Trying to get a program distributed in the USA while living in Hong Kong is nontrivial he writes I would imagine so And what is it that Scofield has for us A DOS utility called EDDY which stands for EDit DirectorY Perhaps coining acronyms isn t John s strong suit EDDY can sort a directory fiddle with file attributes search and view files patch bytes and copy move or delete files That really doesn t sound too excit ing or original does it But EDDY is a slick tool just the same Full Screen Files True to its name EDDY lets you wander about a full screen display of your current directory and edit You can
60. both in number of programs sold by individual vendors and in the number of vendors that are currently in the market You can also get a feel for the price the market will pay for your product Most important you ll probably get the names and ad dresses of your potential competitors Armed with the names of your com petitors the work is ready to begin All serious software vendors have literature describing their product and many have demo disks for a nominal fee Call them and request a copy of their litera ture You may talk to one of their sales personnel who will probably ask you some questions to try and weed out the serious customer from the person col lecting fuel for his wood stove Be prepared to tell the inevitable white lie since no vendor wants to send literature to a competitor Often you can get information from the com panies by filling out bingo cards in the magazines but you should still expect a follow up call from the companies you selected Meanwhile While you re waiting for the litera ture start analyzing your competition Go to your local office products store and purchase the largest pad of paper you can find desk pads work well especially if they have a pre printed grid Divide the pad into a matrix of boxes Figure 1 The Four Ps Price list price Product quality options packaging warranty discounts two to three inches square Along the Y axis write the n
61. brain a sophisti cated information processing sys tem which reads and interprets sights sounds smells and feelings Some computer scientists are trying to recreate this sophisticated thinking system by using brain cells or neurons to model devices In our brain billions of interconnected neurons communicate with each other via excitory and inhibitory electrochemi cal signals This circuitry a network of seemingly simple cells helps us see hear speak learn think create remem ber and act Although a human brain is a little slow from a computer s perspective it consumes little power and can process information in parallel By parallel processing our brains can draw con 16 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 clusions by associating many kinds of in formation A run of the mill computer processes serially yet more accurately and faster than a human being It roars through cal culations at often amazing speeds while brains plod through simple math at a snail s pace Though computers store knowledge in megabytes they can t draw on it without specific instructions ie a program Meanwhile given a few simple clues a five year old child can recall relevant events quickly by as sociating Human brain power speech recogni tion perception vision language processing language acquisition sequen tial thought processing and conscious ness far exceeds that of any known compu
62. differentiation It s easy at this point to fall into the trap of saying to yourself TIl add fea tures and lower the price so my product will sell like canned beer IC 1Mbit 51258 4464 41256 41256 41256 41256 41264 on IBM PC XT Compaq Portable amp Plus hp Vectra 27256 27128 oe w ry ee a o N m lt q o oO a i a a oc Ww I H e x T Te oe s 27C1024 64Kx16 150 ns 27C1000 128kx8 200 ns 27C512 43256L 12 32Kx8 120 ns 5864LP 12 8Kx8 120 ns Editor s note Lots of beer companies have tried the same procedure Unsuccess fully Remember that everything is a tradeoff Can you really lower the price and still offer good customer service Keep in mind that price differentia tion is the worst reason to make a continue decision Price competition can be very destructive to yourself your competitors and eventually your cus tomer Feasibility Study What you have just done is a simple market feasibility study This is not to say that you are finished with your market research but you should now have enough information to make an in formed decision on market potential The matrix is a tool Like any other tool you can use it to create a work of art or a pile of kindling It depends on you In a future article I ll discuss more tools tools that take you further into the realm of market research If you have questions
63. directed toward a narrow market segment or specialized need Programs fitting into this category in clude routines which calculate the optimum way to saw a log into lumber Direction To sell a product you must understand the needs and wants of your target audience Your goal is to meet those needs more effectively than your competitors This article will cover marketing We ll also discuss tools for deter mining what to offer your target audience Let s say you have an idea for a new program and you want to assess its potential market The easiest way to do that is to find out how many other companies are already there A quick trip to your local software supermarket is a good start Also check a couple of years 62 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 worth of BYTE PC and Micro C magazines Let s say your search turns up nothing similar to your idea Perhaps you ve stumbled on the one remain ing unexploited vertical market But have you Probably 75 of all software never makes it into your local software supermarket or any of the popular computer press Why Because the people who purchase that kind of software don t read computer magazines What do these folks read Sometimes noth ing But most of these people subscribe to one or more trade magazines and you ll usually find ads for software that appeals to the same vertical markets that the magazines do e prepared to tell the inevitable white lie s
64. edit the filename date time or attribute byte Just cruise about with your cursor to whatever you want to change Press Enter to record your changes or Esc if you d rather not There s also an Undo command Full screen editing is a new idea in the directory utility field particularly when it extends to all of the vulnerable file characteristics like name includ ing extension date time and certain attribute bits The cursor leaps lightly over the file size because that s not one of the things subject to EDDY s editing EDDY s screens are a bit busy but the information is useful and he in cludes help screens You can sort your directory several ways and you can invert the order with an Alt I You can customize EDDY the program has a patch area Since EDDY can edit any bytes in a disk file you can use EDDY on itself to change the defaults Be careful this qualifies as user driven self modifying code The most interesting stuff _ The Better Mousetrap Clearly there s nothing in EDDY that s really new Scofield feels EDDY is Reader Service Number 87 similar than easier and programs The 39 page user s manual is written in a breezy style My particular favorite is the section titled What Annoys Me Most About EDDY Is Scofield then gives a laundry list of potential problems and recommended resolu tions cheaper The Path To Scofield s Door EDDY is up to version 2 3
65. expand the descrip tion of a rectangle in a standard posi tion in order to describe an arbitrary rectangle First define the plane which embeds the rectangle We can no longer say which side of the rectangle is the top so just pick any corner to be the origin Connect two sides of the rectangle to the point we picked for the origin denote one the X extent and the other the Y extent It doesn t matter which side you call what just remember to define the ex tents to start at the origin and go to the other corner on that side The notion of calibrating one vector with respect to another can be used to test whether a point extends beyond the X or Y ex tents In summary we define a rectangle by adding two vectors the X extent and Y extent N the normal vector O the origin c the plane constant O N X the X extent and Y the Y extent The astute reader will observe that N and c are redundant in the sense that the rectangle could be fully defined from O X and Y N and c are carried along to simplify calculations A point P lies in a rectangle if three conditions hold First the point must lie in the plane of the rectangle 1 PeNe ec Second the projection of the point onto the X extent must lie on the top side of the rectangle 2 0 lt P 0 X X X lt 1 The same applies to the Y extent 3 0 lt P O Y Y lt To find out whether a ray i
66. feel free to drop me a letter PROMPT DELIVERY SAME DAY SHIPPING USUALLY QUANTITY ONE PRICES SHOWN for FEB 15 1988 DYNAMIC RAM 1048Kx1 100 ns 256Kx1 100 ns 64Kx4 120 ns 256Kx1 80 ns 256Kx1 100 ns 256Kx1 120 ns 256Kx1 150 ns 64Kx4 120 ns EPROM 64Kx8 200 ns 32Kx8 250 ns 16Kx8 250 ns STATIC RAM 80287 8 80387 16 160 00 245 00 80387 20 087 2 8 S OPEN 61 2 DAYS 7 30 am 10 pm SHIP VIA FED EX ON SAT SAT DELIVERY MasterCard VISA or UPS CASH COD INCLUDED ON Factory New Prime Parts uPoo FEDEX ORDERS MICROPROCESSORS UNLIMITED INC 24 000 S Peoria Ave 918 267 4961 BEGGS OK 74421 Th Std Air 4 1 b Fr P l_ 10 50 2 tb No minimum order Please note that prices are subject to change Shipping amp insurance extra amp up to 1 for packing materials Orders received by 9 PM CST can usually be delivered the next morning via Federal Express Standard Air 4 00 or guaranteed next day Priority One 10 50 oo i a PUBLISHING GROUP 1240 Johnson Ferry Place Suite A10 Marietta GA 30068 404 977 6034 P S See us in Atlanta at COMDEX Spring 88 lil Reader Service Number 37 Reader Service Number 35 64 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 tas IME Ly a eae PRY 9 n p Mey AA y The McT ek286B Lap Top com bines the fastest most reliable AT motherboard available lt 4 with the most visible full size LCD lap top s
67. file IOLIB ASM as shown Changed instruction marked with FGETS3 MOV A L POP H MOV M A H 7FH EOL was CPI LF FGETS2 The problem arises because FGETS fetches characters with calls to GETC which in turn swallows the character as sumed to be a line feed following a carriage return Thus CPI LF is never true END OF LISTING Around the Bend continued from page 4 Later Just the other day I was showing a fellow through the of fice He was thinning a bit at the top and his quiet demeanor reminded me of the old man at the coast I proudly pointed out our new clones the ones with the high power processors copious RAM winchesters everything that technology could offer Then he noticed my Big Board That s an early CP M machine I told him He brightened a bit and ran his fingers over the dusty cir cuit board A friend had one of these Once SOG Fly In Speaking of flying Bill Davidson PC Tech will be bringing his Bonanza to SOG Cecil Stump will no doubt be showing up in his 172 So they re organizing a fly in On July 14 16 Bend International Airstrip will host the SOG VII fly in There ll be a couple of pilot rental cars at the airport large old station wagons space to park your plane room to sleep under the wing and a chemical john a nice one avail able when the FBO is closed If the weather s nasty extremely unlikely we ll throw my Stinson out
68. find a way of coding the messages by using long blocks rather than coding the messages individually So the error rate is reduced to 0 provided we don t try to reduce entropy at a rate higher than the capacity In other words if we use an average of 1 0 28 3 6 characters for reducing one unit of uncertainty instead of the 1 character we would use in a noiseless channel it would be possible to reduce the equivocation to 0 The price we pay of course is that we re resolving uncer tainty at a lower rate 0 28 per symbol sent instead of 1 per symbol in a noise less channel I won t go into the details of the proof of this theorem but let s consider why it s important Shannon s theorem didn t tell us how to resolve uncertainty It simply showed us the minimum number of symbols needed to reduce uncertainty to 0 It s up to code theorists to come up with the solutions This result is remarkable because it shows that something that seems intui tively impossible is possible And this theoretical reassurance has stimulated the development of coding methods which try to get the equivocation as near 0 as possible In practice once the equivocation is very low there may not be an advantage in lowering the rate through longer blocks Even if we repeat a message over and over again we can t be absolutely sure there will be no errors but based on Shannon s theorem it is possible That s It Though the the
69. following heading Order From ADD TO THE POWER OF YOUR PROGRAMS WHILE YOU SAVE TIME AND MONEY CBTREE does it all Your best value in a B tree source Save programming time and effort You can develop exciting file access programs quickly and easily because CBTREE provides a simple but powerful program interface to all B tree operations Every aspect of CBTREE is covered thoroughly in the 70 page Users Manual with complete examples Sample programs are provided on disk Gain flexibility in dasigning your applications CBTREE lets you use multiple keys variable key lengths concatenated keys and any data record size and record length You can customize the B tree parameters using utilities provided Your programs will be using the most efficient searching techniques CBTREE provides the fastest keyed file access performance with multiple indexes in a single file and crash recovery utilities CBTREE is a full function implementation of the industry standard B tree access method and is proven in applications since 1984 Access any record or group of records by e Get first Get previous Get less than Get greater than Get sequential block Get all partial matches Insert key and record Delete key and record e Change record location Get last e Get next Get less than or equal Get partial key match Insert key Delete key Increase your implementation productivity CBTREE is over
70. known as MIX C and was generally considered an excellent choice for learn ing C Power C is an ANSI compatible optimizing compiler and sells for the amazing low price of 19 95 What do you get for such a small amount of money Power C has a huge library 400 functions which is a superset of the MSC v4 0 library There seems to be a function for every occasion including simple graphics and support for CGA EGA and Hercules graphics cards The source for the library is available for 10 00 The performance claims on the back cover of the manual look awfully good Are they true Well there are bugs in the release 1 0 0 I received For in stance even following MIX s sugges tions I couldn t get Power C to compile any programs which contain recursion TIl wait for the fixed version they re sending me As soon as I can compile all the benchmarks TIl add Power C to the master charts Memory Models and Pointers If you re going to do intricate or sys tem level programming under MS DOS you ll need to understand how the microprocessor and MS DOS handle memory Let s take a quick look The 8086 8088 microprocessor seg ments its memory whereas chips such as the older Z80 think of memory as being flat In a flat memory space ad dresses are linear The Z80 uses 16 bits to indicate an address which translated into 64K or 65 536 bytes of memory To expand memory addressing beyond 64K Intel added fou
71. labels opcodes operands with comments unchanged e Optional 8080 to 8086 source code translator FOR WRITERS e Word Wrap and paragraph formatting at adjustable margins e Right margin justification e Support foreign graphic and special characters e Convert to from WordStar and mainframe files e Print any portion of file selectable printer margins MACRO PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE e If then else looping testing branching user prompts keyboard input 17 bit algebraic expressions variables e Flexible windowing forms entry select size color etc e Simplifies complex text processing formatting conversions and translations e Complete TECO capability e Free macros Full screen file compare merge Sort mailing lists Print Formatter e Menu driven tutorial CompuView 1955 Pauline Blvd Ann Arbor MI 48103 313 996 1299 TELEX 701821 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 47 By Scott Robert Ladd P O Box 61425 Denver CO 80206 303 322 7294 A C Compiler Update And Secrets Of MS DOS Scott updates his C review from last issue and then looks closely at C s near pointers far pointers model sizes ghew I m glad that C compiler ff review is over with that was a lot p of compiling and linking and com w piling and linking and compiling and 4 linking and what The UPS man With another compiler More than ONE Well I guess IIl sign for it A current table of be
72. ll never be satisfied with returning to DOS to list files format disks or copy rename or erase files Nor will you be happy with a DOS shell because shell programs are just as inaccessible as DOS when you are using an application program Only one program combines memory residency with the power of a full featured disk manager WindowDOS Version 2 0 Features Not Found In DOS Sort directories in 8 ways or not at all Copy erase and move groups of files Find any file in seconds Display default directory of any drive with a single keystroke Display graphic tree Global copy amp erase commands Copy function prompts you to insert another disk when necessary Display hidden files and subdirecto ries Display file contents in various for mats and page forward backward Display Wordstar files in readable format Unique RAM Environment function shows name size location and interrupts of every program in memory Rename subdirectories for instant reorganization Hide and unhide subdirectories See and change file attributes Send control codes to printer Switch default printer Password lock your system Set AT Real Time Clock 5 minute screen blanking function Input response macros Enhances These Functions Format disks faster than DOS Make and erase subdirectories Copy rename and erase files Copy files to printer or COM ports Display disk free s
73. need to constantly toggle Nums Lock And the Turbo 101 s exclusive tactile feedback keys let you type faster with fewer mistakes than ever before ThinkTank is the world s most powerful out liner and idea processor It will introduce you step by step to a fascinating new way of organizing and managing your ideas your time your business and even your thinking And to get you up and running quickly and easily we even include 30 predefined Think Tank Productivity Templates ThinkTank is considered by many to be one of the most important productivity enhancers on a micro computer It turns thoughts into reality and ideas into results Instantly Upgrade Your Productivity The Turbo 101 and ThinkTank are both designed to instantly streamline and improve your computing performance regardless of which model PC XT AT Tandy or com patible you use With our Turbo 101 ThinkTank bundle you ll feel the difference from the tip of your fingers to the center of your brain For an unthinkable 149 95 p ene i You Don t Have _ To Be A Brain Surgeon To Understand This Special Offer ThinkTank is already a best seller at 195 So it s easy to figure out that getting both the critically acclaimed Turbo 101 keyboard and the ThinkTank software for the price of the keyboard alone 149 95 is a deal that turbocharges your PC without flattening your wallet And that s not all our USA made Turbo 101 keyboa
74. network jargon we say calculation propagates back from the output layer through the hidden layer to the input layer modifying weights if necessary The learning procedure alternates be tween the first phase and the second phase until the system learns to associate the input pattern to the target pattern Hopefully the thing converges We can test the knowledge of the sys tem by looking at the input units of an input pattern and verifying the output produced Units in any layer are updated synchronously The equations we use during the first phase to calculate the net input the activation and the output of each unit are as follows The net input into an input unit i is Figure 2 A Three layer Neural Net Used As A Pattern Associator INPUT HIDDEN LAYER LAYER VISIBLE INPUTS FROM THE ENVIRONMENT model there are no interconnections within any layer Though the theory doesn t exclude these connections The hidden neurons try to capture higher order features characteristic of the inputs and outputs These charac teristics cannot be extracted using simple pairwise connections between inputs and outputs A Learning Algorithm The training rule for this model works in two phases 18 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 OUTPUT LAYER VISIBLE OUTPUTS TO THE ENVIRONMENT given by Neti t I t Bi where I t is the i component of the input pattern and Bj is the bias of
75. noise glitch the receiving device the 8250 on a PC rechecks the signal by sampling it several times After the last data bit some extra in formation arrives If you have parity turned on then the 8250 adds a 1 or 0 to make the number of 1 bits in the charac ter even or odd Even or odd parity If one of the bits was received incor rectly then the receiving end would notice that the number of ones was no longer correct If two bits changed then parity checking wouldnt catch the problem The stop bits arrive last you can use 1 1 5 or 2 The stop bits return the line to its marking state They allow the receiv ing system some time to take care of things before the next byte starts The most common configuration you ll probably use is eight bits no parity one stop bit This means ten bits are transmitted for each byte So if you divide your bit rate also known as baud rate by ten the result will tell you ap proximately how many bytes per second FRAME or e FRAME r 30 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 ae you will move For example at 9600 bits sec 9600 baud you ll move approximately 960 bytes per second This number is only approximate since most file transfer protocols described later add bytes to the beginning and end of each data block After a byte has arrived the 8250 places it in a temporary storage register and sets some flags If there were an un read byte in t
76. of detail other levels of obscurity exist below this one And there are plenty of topics we didn t even discuss How about the instruction set And what does microcode really look like I could easily have filled this whole issue but Dave and our advertisers would have me strung up If you re hankerin for more take a wade through some of the following Sources This series in Micro Cornucopia in cludes issues e 35 8253 Counter Timer e 36 8259 Interrupt Controller e 37 8237 DMA Controller e 40 8255 Programmable pheral Interface And a bit more light reading e IBM s Technical Reference for the PC XT e Intel s 8086 Family User s Manual Component Data Catalog and Microsystem Components Handbook e Murray Sargent and Richard L Shoemaker s The IBM Personal Computer From the Inside Out e David C Willen and Jeffrey I Krantz s 8088 Assembler Language Programming The IBM PC Peri Barbeque Computer tech talk SOG VII July 14 July 16 Bend Oregon See you there MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 41 How Much Information Does A Message Contain An Introduction To Information Theory Who the heck cares about information theory If we wanted theoretical stuff we d call ourselves Micro Theoretician Micro C is for practical solutions to real problems like the following Enjoy munication developed by Claude E Shannon in 1948 is regarded as one of the intell
77. of software flow con trol is that you make no assumptions about hardware Designers also use many of the other lines for hardware handshaking often with frustrating results For a simple to use generic interface it s best if you use only the Tx Rx and ground lines with XON XOFF flow con trol Universal RS 232 Cable Ha Ha Figure 4 shows the solution I usually use when I make up an RS 232 cable It s hard to test whether you need a crossed cable it s easiest to try both ways and see which one works To save hassles I just wire in a double pole double throw DPDT switch so I can pop it back and forth to cross and uncross Rx and Tx The other wiring shown will satisfy any hardware handshaking I ve used a cable like this to transfer files from one computer to another using a public domain communication program almost any one will work as long as the same protocol is used on both ends Figure 4 Universal RS 232 Cable CONNECTOR RS 232 On The PC Clones support two serial ports generally referred to as COMI and COM2 Each of these ports has its own interrupt You may find when configuring your serial card via jumpers or dip switches that you can also make the ports COM3 and COM4 Selecting these options places the ports in an unused I O area There is no interrupt or operating system support for COM3 or COM4 and the lack of inter rupts severely limits their usefulness Editor s note On PCs CO
78. one symbol for each mes sage we would actually be using more symbols than we need A situation like this in which the uncertainty per symbol is less than the maximum which can be handled as we know we can handle 1 s_bit of entropy using a two character set is said to exhibit redundancy While normally one would want to cut out redundancy it has important uses For example we can use it to counter the distortion or noise of a message Noise The most significant contribution of Shannon s work was a result known as Shannon s Second Theorem The First Theorem says it should be possible by using block coding to use a string of bi nary characters whose length equals the entropy The second theorem says that even if messages get corrupted in transmission it s always possible to counteract this by sending a somewhat longer message This is a remarkable result and is at first sight somewhat counter intuitive Let s consider a specific example Let s say we have a message in which the two symbols 0 and 1 are sent with equal probabilities 0 5 We know that with 2 equally possible alternatives the uncertainty or entropy is log 2 or 1 s_bit If the messages are transmitted accurate ly the information conveyed is 1 s_bit for each character transmitted Now suppose there is random distor tion so that when a 1 is sent 80 of the time it s received as a 1 but 20 of the time it s corrupted into a 0 Sim
79. possible configurations In the examples above I ve con sidered cases where there are 8 16 or 32 alternatives all powers of 2 So when we take the logarithm to base 2 we get whole numbers like 3 4 or 5 This is the number of 0 s and 1 s we need to repre sent the number of alternatives uniquely But what if the number of alternatives is say 5 If we look in a table of logarithms we find the logarithm of 5 to the base 2 is 2 32 193 It doesn t seem to make sense to say that we need a minimum of 2 32 0 s and 1 s to uniquely represent 5 pos sibilities First we can see in a general way why it comes out as more than 2 but less than 3 With two characters we can rep resent only 4 possibilities which is not enough and with 3 we can represent 8 possibilities which is more than we need However we can go further than this If we try to code a message distinguish ing among 5 alternatives we re forced to use 3 characters even though it s more than we need By Ramachandran Bharath Mgmt Mktg amp CIS Dept Northern Michigan University Marquette MI 49855 We think generally of 2 raised to the power 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 as meaning 2 mul tiplied by itself 1 2 3 or 4 times What then is 2 multiplied by itself 2 32 times 2 raised to the power 2 32 5 What if we raised 5 to the power 100 i e multiply it by itself 100 times That would be the same as multiplying 2 raised to the power 2 32 by its
80. rather than in dividual ones Let s consider the mes sages in blocks of two There are four possibilities AA AB BA or BB The rela tive frequencies with which we will get these sequences are in Figure 1 Since the entropy calculations tell us that on the average the message A should require a string of less than one character we try to economize on the AA s by using just one character say 0 to represent them We want to make the four messages uniquely decodable so we shouldn t use 0 as the start for any of the Figure 1 Relative Frequencies 4 5 X 4 5 16 25 or 0 64 prob 4 5 X 1 5 4 25 or 0 16 prob 1 5 X 4 5 4 25 or 0 16 prob 1 5 X 1 5 1 25 or 0 04 prob others So we represent AB by 10 and then for similar reasons we represent BA by 110 and BB by 111 see Figure 2 We see that the average number of O s and 1 s we would use for two messages is 0 64 x 1 0 16 2 0 20 3 1 56 or 0 78 per message There are various theoretical con siderations regarding how best to code Figure 2 Two character Strings Message Code Length Probability 0 0 64 0 16 0 16 messages to make them uniquely decodable while trying to reach the min imum limit indicated by entropy calcula tions I won t go into this branch of knowledge known as Coding Theory However the economy and efficiency that coding theory has been able to achieve are a direct result of Shannon s formula If we use
81. that no clues were offered as to what the technique was Presumably it was left as an exercise for the reader Of course you can reduce the size of the compiler s ASM output by slim ming down the runtime library files After that probably the best way to keep your object files small is to avoid appending LIBASM C and use printf as little as possible Without a linker it s a real pain to have to include needed routines from the C library Especially since you have to be careful about functions that in turn call other functions as both printf and dtoi do But simply appending LIBASM C to your source file will add 3K to your final program The biggest offender is printf Avoiding it altogether or at least reserving it for those programs where the alternative would be truly cumber some or inconvenient will pay hand some dividends in terms of reduced program size When you think about it how often Figure 3 Small C Vers 2 03 ASM Bug Fixes do you really need all the flexibility of printf Most of the time you can out put a line by repeated calls to fputs fputc and the Small C conversion functions itod itoxQ and itou Obviously it s a lot handier to write printf Words 6d n words than it is to muddle your way through fputs Words stdout fputs itod words numstr 6 stdout fputc n stdout But the latter eliminates the con siderable overhead asso
82. the 20 bit address It does this by combining the contents of one of the 16 bit segment registers with a 16 bit offset Think of the segment ad dress as the beginning of a block of memory and the offset as an index into that block We get 20 bits by shifting the segment address four bits to the left Adding the resulting 20 bit number to the offset gives an address within the 1 MByte space 38 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 See C ing Clearly in this issue for more on memory addressing Segmented memory does add to programmers confusion But it s really not that much of a hassle and it gives us all an excuse for Intel bashing 8088 Pinout The 8088 lives in a standard 40 pin DIP package See Figure 2 Nothing mysterious about A8 through A15 These pins provide eight bits of address which are valid throughout the entire bus cycle The rest of the address lines share their space with either data ADO through AD7 or status A16 S3 through A19 S6 signals Time multiplexing allows this shar ing of a pin and a bus by two signals Let s look at ADO During the first T of the four or more T states in a bus cycle ADO holds AO T2 gives time to set the direction of the transfer and the BIU reads or writes a valid D0 for the rest of the bus cycle If the I O deals with a slow device the device may pull the 8088 s READY line low telling the processor that the device hasn t had time to plac
83. who has overcome problems with the clock in the 84 series Kaypro 10 I bought the machine partly because it had the clock Since new it has jumped hours between power down and power up Kaypro in Australia looked at it under warranty But as it was one if the first they had seen they couldn t help although they were most obliging I bought the Advent clock fix board but it didn t make any dif ference Advent very promptly refunded my money I have the Advent Turbo ROM but the benefit of on screen time display is lost Has anyone any comments Has anyone ever seen a_ public domain multiformat program like MFDISK for Kaypros which has source included I m surprised that there doesn t seem to be anything available I would be most interested in hearing from anyone especially as I am rather isolated here in Indonesia Dr D Yates IPB Aust Project Jakarta Bag Locked Bag 40 Queen Victoria Tce Parkes ACT 2600 Australia Editor s guess You ve moved the Kaypro through so many time zones that it s jumpy Or your board might be having an AI problem Stephen S Mitchell 320 King St Suite 506 Alexandria VA 22314 703 360 4659 Small C Utilities Continued Small C has been a part of the computer com munity longer than most computers In this final look at Small C utilities Steve brings us details on special things to watch for in printf and the ASM assembler n Micro C Iss
84. with Tilt Swivel e Hercules Compatible Monographics video card 200 page Documentation and User Manual e Designed and Made in U S A with 1 year warranty Call for our AT 386 machine 4075 Dhrystones Options 10MHz Upgrade 20MB XT Kit ST225 30MB XT Kit ST238 Seagate ST225 20MB Seagate ST251 40MB 150 279 309 249 449 14 EGA Monitor Card Add 399 Taxan 770 Multisyne 499 2MB EMS Card 129 EVGA 1280x600 295 Everex 1200B modem 89 Miniscribe 6053 43MB 595 Everex 2400B modem 179 Micropolis 70MB 28ms 895 Software Call All hardware boards include manuals and software for easy installation Call for further infomation and other products Ask for our catalog AmTech Computers 3701 Guadalupe St Suite 103 Austin Texas 78705 512 451 0921 Terms Cashier s Check Money Order VISA MC 3 personal checks allow 10 days to clear Shipping will be added Prices and availability subject to change without notice Texas residents add 7 Tax Reader Service Number 44 New from MSC NanoLISP A Common LISP Interpreter for MS DOS NanoLISP contains a large useful subset of the Common LISP standard including most Common LISP operations and adheres precisely to the specifications of the standard 99 99 e Helpful Features extremely thorough error checking explicit error messages excellent debugging facilities e Advanced Features lexical and dynamic closures lambda list keywords generic seque
85. yourboard Host Interface Board KAYPRO IC S 81 189 Video Pal 81 194 RAM Pal 81 Series Character Gen ROMs 81 Series Monitor ROMS POWER SUPPLIES 0 8VDC 100A Metered 249 00 Volt amp Current Regulated 5V 1A 5V 2A 12V 1A 12V 2A 24VLO5A 000 9 90 HOURS Mon Fri 9 6 Sat 10 4 MINIMUM ORDER 15 00 TERMS VISA MasterCard Certified Checks Money Order NO COD Visa and MasterCard add 3 Personal checks must clear BEFORE we ship include shipping charges California residents add 6 Sales Tax For more information please write or call 12MS NEW 24V INTERNAL BATTERY 75 CPU amp SUPPORT CHIPS ee ICL7107 LCD Driver 7 00 eT o E mer went S eats 5 00 VC3524 Switching Regulators 5 00 1458 Dual Op AMP 70 LM2877P 4W Stereo Amp Dual 2 50 MB81464 15 ice scte teak aces 2 75 21 lOa rrean a E EEEE DEA 3 00 AEN E TENE A AEE 3 25 PAA ST ere EES E 3 50 PAA O I a EEE uae dean 9 00 TAHCOD 2 ce Wed et ose saa aes TALS T25 poeren Pee deel TALSI TI aeieea reau e TALSITA paet i aa Reader Service Number 93 SWITCHERS 5V 9 5A 12V 3 8A 12V 8A 5VISA 12V 2A 12V 4A 0 5V 6A 12V 2A 12V 1A o ae SVIBA 24V 1 A 12V 6A MISCELLANEOUS Z80 Controller w 8 bit AID Conv 15 95 Nicd Pack 12V 5AH 6 50 Joystick 4 Switches 1 Knob 5 50
86. 088 CPU chip that includes a full 8080 instruction set as well as the standard 8088 set Systems using an 8086 may substitute a V30 chip UniDOS by MicroSolutions UniDOS w UniForm and V20 8 chip 135 00 UniDOS Z80 Coprocessor Board by MicroSolutions This 8 Mhz Z80H half card will run your Z80 and 8080 code programs at LIGHTNING speed on your PC or AT Functions just like the UniDOS program except NO V20 or emulation mode is required to run your programs Now includes UniForm PC UniDOS Z80 Coprocessor Card 169 95 initials as columns The element BE of the matrix is set to one only if there is a per son with such initials Obviously if a value in the matrix is set to one all other values in the same row and column must be zeros Vice versa if two values in the same row or column are zeros the third value must be a one Figure 10 shows a Prolog program using var The query names Mat is answered by finding the matrix Mat Note the help given to Prolog by encod ing the third clue It says that either AD is an initial or else AE must be and then BD is not After the constraints have been set the predicate infer is repeatedly called as long as there is at least one row or column inference This is achieved with the help of another extra logical feature called cut Where there s a cut the program will not backtrack past the cut to find alter nate solutions The row and column in ferences are done i
87. 1 CGA GetDriverName 3 EGA GetDriverName 7 HercMono Main PREDICATES Function Real Real Real Real Real Real Real Real Real Iterate Real Real Real Real Real Real Real Real Real Real Iterate_Trace Real Real Real Real Real Real Real Real Real Real Main Main_menu CLAUSES Initialize NextProcess Integer Process Integer Testwindow Integer ToGraphic GetMaxColor MaxColors assert maxcolors MaxColors GetMaxX MaxX assert maxX MaxX GetMaxY MaxY assert maxY MaxY GetAspectRatio Xasp Yasp AspectRatio Xasp Yasp assert aspectCorr AspectRatio CLAUSES Iterate X L Count I XScale yScale Height Width YStart XStart Y X 1 X Y XNext Yl yY L Row amp Col are scaled Row Height Y1 YStart YScale Height Col Count XStart XScale Width putpixel Col Row 7 Newcount Count I XEnd XScale XStart GetDriverName G Driver G Name A RY aa eae ne ned a aa A oe ma 7 i assert driver G Driver G Mode G_Nama Iterate Y1 L Newcount I XScale YScale Height InitGraph G Driver G Mode bgi Path F aph G_Driver G_ Mode Z lt e Bg Path Width YStart XStart ToGrapHic Detect graphic equipment DetectGraph G Driver G Model KeepColor G Driver G Model G Mode MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 83 Iterate_Trace X L Count I
88. 1 and is beginning to make its way into software libraries and onto bulletin boards Scofield asks a modest registration fee of US 15 Write to John Scofield Box 47136 Morrison Hill P O Hong Kong He notes that EDDY is also available on the Computer Language magazine forum on CompuServe MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 61 Gary L Scott Decision Technology P O Box 5040 Aloha OR 97007 ls There A Market For Your Product You re a technical person right So how are you researching the market for you new product idea Not very technically I d guess In the following ar ticle Gary shows you how to apply a matrix to marketing ow do you determine the market potential for your brainstorm Is the easiest and best method to simply spend the next six months developing your new product Then call up all of the dealers on the West Coast that carry your type of product and offer to sell it to them Then sit back and wait for the money to roll in This article will address commercial vertical market software Although we will concentrate on marketing commercial software most of what we discuss here should also work for the programmer who has written a fancy new utility Before we get in too far it s important to define the difference between horizontal and vertical markets Horizontal market Programs like word processors that almost anyone in any job can use Vertical market Specialty programs
89. 2 33 characters per message By using even longer blocks we move down to the limit of 2 32 which the measure of information uncertainty tells us is the minimum number of characters required Practical Examples I ve already talked about a number of alternative messages Now in practice we don t send messages by having a set of codes for each of the possible alterna tives We construct them by using a series of characters from some alphabet For example a message may be made up of letters of the English alphabet plus punctuation marks numbers and so on But the analysis above can easily handle this Think of each character in the mes sage as a mini message selected from a set of alternatives since we could have chosen any one of the characters of the alphabet We know that computers store or transmit information coding the letters of the alphabet using strings of 0 s and 1 s The most widely used code is ASCII which uses a string of 7 0 s and 1 s to provide 2 to the power 7 or 128 alterna tives to represent the letters numbers special symbols etc So each character is a message with about 7 units of uncertainty And since uncertainty is additive we can think of the uncertainty in a long piece of text as the sum of the uncertainty in each of the strings of 7 0 s and 1 s used Now let s look at the measure of un certainty from a slightly different angle which will help in considering the c
90. 32 bit fixed point rep resentation for numbers we ll represent vectors by three such numbers I chose not to pass vectors around in registers Instead vectors are always in memory and I pass memory pointers A vector in memory consists of three 32 bit numbers in consecutive memory locations The pointer to the vector points to the first number In the 34010 memory addressing is by bits So if a pointer is pointing to the x coordinate then the y coordinate is at offset 32 and the z coordinate is at off set 64 from the base The following definitions identify the individual com ponents Point px equ 0000H PY equ 0020H pz equ 0040H Memory references in the 34010 can be made to any bit boundary and can be for 1 to 32 consecutive bits The 34010 status register has two field size fields The field size fields tell the 34010 how many bits to read or write during memory accesses When a memory value of less than 32 bits is loaded into a 32 bit register the 34010 will either zero fill the upper bits or sign extend the value through the upper bits The SETF instruction sets the field size Syntax is SETF lt FS gt lt FE gt lt F gt where field size 1 32 extend option 0 zero fill sign extend field number 0 or 1 I like to set the field sizes as follows SETF 16 1 0 SETF 32 0 1 Field 0 is 16 bit sign extended field 1 is 32 bit All the subroutines here as sume these setti
91. 4 host board also available Winchester Connection by MICROCode Consulting The most simple and comprehensive hard disk software package available for CP M Designed for use with the WD1002 05 controller board e Works with one or two hard disks 5 to 64 meg e Menu installed no software to assemble e Complete hardware tests and error handling Automatic swap for warm boots from hard drive e Software drivers install above or below CP M e Allows custom partition sizes and mixed drive types e Independent block and directory sizes on each partition e Includes manual format test park and swap utilities Winchester Connection Software only HDS Board with Winchester Connection Software HDS Bare Board with software HDS Board WD1002 05 and software Call or write for other pricing options WD1002 05 HARD DISK CONTROLLER BOARD by Western Digital e Standard ST506 drive interface e Same size as standard 514 drive e 40 pin interface to host computer e WD2797 floppy disk controller interface on board e Can control up to three hard drives e Direct replacement for Kaypro 10 controller WD1002 05 Controller Board Other Western Digital boards available Prices subject to change without notice VISA and Mastercard accepted Include 5 00 shipping and handling 7 50 for COD UPS Blue or RED Label additional according to weight Please include your phone number with all correspondence Kaypro KayPLUS ROM Set by MICROCode Consulting Wa
92. 5 179 MICROSOFT SER OR BUS MOUSE DISK OPTIMIZER 70 65 ACTOR 495 419 MKS TOOLKIT 139 115 W EASY CAD FETCH 55 45 ADVANTAGE C 495 479 MKSRCS NEW SPECIAL 189 169 W MS WINDOWS NORTON COMMANDER 75 55 PFORCE 4 395 215 MKS ROPS ee rey ioe Ago PC MOUSE BUS W PNT amp POPUPS PC TOOLS DELUXE NEW 80 69 SMALLTALK V 100 85 NORTON GUIDES 100 65 PC MOUSE SER W PNT amp POPUPS PDISK 145 105 SMALLTALK V286 NEW 200 169 pC LINT SPECIAL 139 95 SUMMAMOUSE VFEATURE 8 75 APPLICATION PACKS 45 POLYMAKE 149 129 EDITORS OPERATING SYSTEMS POLYTRON PVCS CALL CALL C COMPILERS BRIEF 195 CALL MICROPORT SYS V AT 549 469 PRE C 295 159 500 269 W DBRIEF 275 CALL SCO XENIX SYSTEM V 1295 995 SOURCE PRINT 95 15 MICROSOFT C 450 285 EMACS 295 265 WENDIN DOS 99 79 TREE DIAGRAMMER 77 69 QUICKC SPECIAL 99 65 EPSILON 195 149 OTHER MICROPORT SCO eae Ye MKS Vi ees WENDIN PRODUCTS CALL CALL C INTERPRETERS MULTI EDIT NEW 99 89 PASCALCOMPILERS C TERP 298 229 PC EDT 250 229 MICROSOFT PASCAL 300 189 INSTANT C 495 379 PMATE 195 115 PASCAL 2 259 CALL RUN C 120 79 SPF PC 245 185 TURBOPASCAL 100 69 RUN C PROFESSIONAL 250 155 VEDIT PLUS 185 129 TURBO PASCAL DEV LIB 395 289 gt BORLAND ADD ONS CALL CALL Terms and Policies i We honor MC VISA AMERICAN EXPRESS No surcharge on credit card or C O D Prepayment by check New York State residents add applicable sales tax Shipping and handling 3 95 per item sent UPS ground Rush service available prevailing rates Programmer s
93. 520 character strings String manipulation e String formatting e DOS command line parser e DOS and BIOS calls e Interrupt and TSR management routines e In memory sort routine fast e Keyboard macro processor and editor e Routines to use both extended and expanded memory Large gt 64K arrays in normal or EMS memory or in virtual memory BCD arithmetic which Turbo lost in the upgrade to version 4 e Runtime error recovery if not fatal your program can continue They include a set of programs that demonstrate the kinds of things you can do with the package several PopUps a dandy little source generator for the menu unit utilities and some impres Vis 85 iih sive window demos I ve had the product for two weeks and haven t begun to explore all the possibilities The routines use both Pas cal and assembler complete source is provided for everything At 99 list if you need even a few of the tools this package provides you can t go wrong Next Time Next time I plan to talk about mixed language programming Some foreign languages are more difficult to integrate than others Sources Turbo Graphix Toolbox Borland International 4585 Scotts Valley Dr Scotts Valley CA 95066 408 438 8400 Tdebug Turbo Professional Turbo Power Software 3109 Scotts Valley Dr Suite 122 Scotts Valley CA 95066 408 438 8608 20 READ WRITE RS IS NEED REPAIR 30
94. 6 000 lines of tightly written commented C source code The driver module is only 20K and links into your programs Port your applications to other machine environments The C source code that you receive can be compiled on all popular C compilers for the IBM PC and also under Unix Xenix and AmigaDos No royalties on your applications that use CBTREE CBTREE supports multi user and network applications CBTREE IS TROUBLE FREE BUT IF YOU NEED HELP WE PROVIDE FREE PHONE SUPPORT ONE CALL GETS YOU THE ANSWER TO ANY QUESTION PEACOCK SYSTEMS INC CBTREE compares favorably with other software selling at 2 3 and 4 times our price Sold on unconditional money back guarantee YOU PAY ONLY 159 00 A MONEY SAVING PRICE TO ORDER OR FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CALL 703 356 7029 or 703 847 1743 OR WRITE Peacock Systems Inc 2108 C Gallows Road Vienna VA 22180 Reader Service Number 20 RUO A Sae Procedural Database and Declarative Language SPEED Where Prolog must backtrack Trilogy can often solve the problem logically Trilogy takes advan tage of logic constraints they constrain the search to possible solutions which either eliminate backtracking or reduce millions of backtracks to a very few SYNTAX Trilogy uses an intuitive Pascal like pro gram structure INTEGRATION Trilogy is complete It s the only language you need for writing Pascal style routines database handlers and Prolog style pro
95. 8 U x like operating system many tools cross development from MS DOS 150 Turbo G Graphics Library all popular adapters hidden line removal 2 135 American Software Resident C TSRify C programs 22 0 5050502820 130 CBTree B tree ISAM driver multiple variable length keys 2 2 2 2008 4 115 Minix Operating System U x like operating system includes manual 2 105 PC IP CMU MIT TCP IP implementation for PCs 2 1 1 ee ee ee ee ee 100 B Tree Library amp ISAM Driver file system utilities by Softfocus 4 100 The Profiler program execution profile tool 2 1 2 ee ee ee ee ee es 100 Entelekon C Function Library screen graphics keyboard string printer etc 100 Entelekon Power Windows menus overlays messages alarms file handling etc 100 Wendin Operating System Construction Kit or PCNX PCVMS O S Shells 95 Professional C Windows windows and keyboard functions soono eee eee eee 80 JATE Async Terminal Emulator includes file transfer and menu subsystem 80 MultiDOS Plus DOS based multitasking intertask messaging semaphores 80 ME programmer s editor with C like macro language by Magma Software 75 WKS Library C program interface to Lotus 1 2 3 program amp files 2 6 eee eee 65 Quincy interactive C interpreter 2 Mpa Ge op ab ae a ae a
96. 9 99 DB_VISTAOR DB_QUERY 195 CALL MICROSOFT WINDOWS 9965 ARTIFICIALINTELLIGENCE NGLE USER W SOURCE MS WINDOWS DEVELOPMENT KIT 500 319 SINGLE USER W SOURC 495 CALL ARITY STANDARD PROLOG 9 79 EO CE ae MULTIUSER 495 CALL PANELPLUS SPECIAL 495 389 MULISP 87 INTERPRETER 300 199 MICRO FOCUS MULTIUSER W SOURCE 990 CALL PANEL QC OR TC 129 99 PC SCHEME 95 85 COBOL 2 900 729 INFORMIX PRODUCTS CALL CALL SCREENSTAR W SOURCE 198 m TURBO PROLOG 100 69 COBOS TLSET 200 729 PHACT MANAGER 249 229 VITAMINC SPECIAL 225 149 TURBO PROLOG TOOLBOX 100 69 rate ieee ae XQL 795 599 eye SCREEN p 2 a ASSEMBLERS LINKERS LEVEL II COBOL 349 279 FORTRANCOMPILERS WINDOWS FOR DATA 295 CALL ADVANTAGE DISASSEMBLER 295 279 PERSONAL COBOL 149 119 LAHEY FORTRAN F77L EM 16 695 625 W SOURCE 590 CALL MS MACRO ASSEMBLER 150 99 OTHERS CALL CALL LAHEY PERSONAL FORTRAN 77 95 89 ADDITIONALPRODUCTS OPTASM NEW 195 169 MICROSOFT COBOL 700 449 MICROSOFT FORTRAN 450 285 ADDITIONA VCMS es Laat PASM86 195 195 MICROSOFT SORT 195 129 RM FORTRAN 595 479 ADVANT ae PLINK86PLUS 495 279 OPT TECH SORT 149 105 REALCICS 995 785 FORTRANLIBRARIES UTILITIES BASIC REALIA COBOL 995 785 DIAGRAM EROR DOCUMENT ER 129 DBL gg RCO HS Ro MACUSNUMERICALANALIST 233 XENIX UNIX SOFTWARE A RM COBOL 85 1250 999 ATHPA 495 MICROPORT amp SCO PRODUCTS CALL CALL Letras SPECIAL a RM SCREENS 395 315 SPINDRIFTLIBRARY SPECIAL 149 ADVANTAGE C 695 625 SCREENIO 400 379 SSP PC 350 BTRIEVE N MS QUICKBASIC 9 6 DIRECTORY SHEL
97. BkColor 0 Set background to black maxX MaxX maxY MaxY R MaxY 50 SetViewPort 0 0 MaxX R 1 Open port to upper screen GetViewSettings Left Top Right Bottom _ Rectangle Left Top Right Bottom Draw Border Height Bottom Top Width Right Left params XStart _ XScale YStart _ Scale Seed Lambda Inc function Inc Seed Height Width XScale YScale Lambda XStart Y Start readchar _ Process 2 Process 3 Initialize SetColor 1 Set current color to white SetBkColor 0 Set background to black maxX MaxX maxY MaxY R MaxY 50 SetViewPort 0 0 Maxx R 1 Open port to upper screen GetViewSettings Left Top Right Bottom Rectangle Left Top Right Bottom Draw Border Height Bottom Top Width Right Left params XStart XEnd XScale YStart _ YScale Seed Lambda I iterate Seed Lambda Seed I XScale YScale Height Width YStart XStart readchar _ Process 3 Process 4 Initialize SetColor 1 Set current color to white SetBkColor 0 Set background to black maxX MaxX maxY MaxY R MaxY 50 SetViewPort 0 0 MaxX R 1 Open port to upper screen 84 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 GetViewSettings Left Top Right Bottom Rectangle Left Top Right Bottom Draw Border Height Bottom Top Width Right Left params XStart XEnd XScale YStart _ YScale Seed Lambda I Iterate_Trace Seed Lambda Seed
98. I QP M Operating System bootable specify system 64 95 QP M without CBIOS installs on any Z80 system 49 95 Networks QP M Network File System by MICROCode Consulting QP M Network File System is an efficient local area network allowing up to seven CP M computers to share peripherals and data resources e Transparent operation at speeds up to 11 000 bytes second in syncronous mode Speeds of up to 1 920 bytes second in asyncronous mode e Local remote disk drive and printer support Remote peripheral support for modems and real time clocks All stations need not be on the network even though connected Local drive access protection and control Simple menu oriented configuration utility e Extended DOS calls are provided for addition of custom net work utilities Works with interrupt driven Z80 systems such as Xerox 820 Kaypro KayPLUS amp Advent ROMs Eagle and other computers running QP M or CP M 2 2 QP M Network File System Hard Disks Need more speed and storage on your system Improve the productivity of your Z80 computer with a hard disk HDS Host Board This daughter board provides a convenient interface for connect ing a Western Digital WD1002 05 hard disk controller to your computer e Plugs into the Z80 socket no other wiring required e 40 pin interface for a WD1002 05 or HDO controller board e Switch selectable I O port addressing e Comes as bare board or assembled amp tested e Kaypro 8
99. IVE ENCLOSURE Attractive Low Profile Chassis 19x15x2 Fits nicely directly under PC e Standard IBM Colors Bezel for 5 4 and 3 2 Drive 9995 3 CONVENIENT LOCATIONS HSC Electronic Supply of Santa Rosa HSC Electronic Supply 6819 S Santa Rosa Ave 5549 Hemlock St Cotati CA Sacramento CA 707 792 2357 tee Minimum order 10 Calitorma residents add 7 sales tax Prepaid orders send fre ign GOD of r Call tor hargas Chipping wil be added to cradi card and COD onde ts Prepaid orders over 100 use money order or check Please do not send cash Some items limited to stock on hand Prices subject to change MAIL ORDERS Reader Service Number 11 LJ A i TE MN SERVING NORTHERN E EA ke l k es SINCE 1963 SPECIALTIES Super Lab Card 495 3060 COPPER RD SANTA CLARA 95051 PC LabCard For IBM AT xTt Multi Lab Card 295 12 bit A D D A DIO Counter 14 bit A D D A DIO Counter Digital VO amp Counter Card 175 Relay Actuator amp Isolated D I Card Prototype Development Card 74 239 PROJECT BOX W FAN e 3 1 2 x7 1 2 x 9 3 Fan Perfect for mounting power supplies or building projects e Black Wrinkle Finish 9 95 1 95 W Fan W O Fan IEEE 488 HARD DRIVE CONTROLLER e ST506 412 Compatible e Manufactured by Xebec e Great forthe Experimentor 2938 WE SHIP C O D Store Hours a Fri 8 00
100. Korean manufacturer reaches an out of court settlement with TI which accused Samsung of violating various semicon 70 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 ductor patents with their 256K DRAM Samsung agrees not happily to pay TI fifty cents per part as a royalty 256K DRAM prices are now about 2 60 and rising End of December 1987 As usual Japanese manufacturing and shipping shut down for two weeks at the end of the year This exacerbates an already bad shortage of parts By the first work week of January prices of typical 256K DRAMs have shot up 1 January 1988 DRAMs simply aren t available in large quantities A broker suggests to me that Samsung doesn t want to pay the patent royalty on DRAMs to TI so is simply not import ing them into the U S By mid January prices have shot past 4 50 per chip 1 Megs aren t so bad only about 28 In a weird violation of the ironclad rule of RAM sales slower is cheaper a broker offers to sell 120 nsec DRAMs for 4 50 150 nsec for 4 65 Why He s out of stock on 150 nsec but has plenty of 120 nsec End of January A broker calls me up and offers 256K DRAMs for 6 50 I don t faint By this time I m numb to the news Now February 3 1988 No relief in sight yet I can t imagine this price run up lasting much longer There are too many companies which depend on reasonably priced RAMs Open up a current PC type magazine Notice the ad prices on 2
101. L 286 QUICKPAK 69 59 COMMUNICATIONS GRAPHICS DIRECTORY SHELL 386 QUICKWINDOWS W SOURCE 99 89 ASCOM IV 195 175 ADVANTAGE GRAPHICS C 250 EPSILON TRUE BASIC 100 79 CARBON COPY PLUS 195 159 ESSENTIALGRAPHICS 250 FOXBASE 798 129 TURBO BASIC 100 69 CO SESSION 2 USER NEW 249 225 GSSGRAPHIC DEV TOOLKIT 495 INFORMIX PRODUCTS CALL CALL TURBO BASIC TOOLBOXES 100 69 SUPPORT NEW 175 155 HALO 300 JYACCFORMAKER 395 APPLICATION NEW 125 115 HALO 5MICROSOFT LANG 595 JYACCJAM 1350 PTEL 50 45 METAWINDOW PLUS 275 KORN SHELL MOUSE PRODUCTS SIDETALK 120 89 TURBOWINDOW C 95 MICROSOFT LANGUAGES TURBO HALO FOR TURBO C 99 LOGITECH SERIAL OR BUS DEBUGGERS PANEL PLUS MOUSE z WIPLUS SOFTWARE ADVANCED TRACE 86 175 119 MODULA 2 RM COBOL W PLUS LOGICPAINT PERISCOPE SPECIAL 345 269 LOGITECH MODULA 2 RM FORTRAN W PLUS LOGICADD MOUSE PERISCOPE II SPECIAL 175 135 COMPILER KIT 99 WINDOWS FOR DATA W PLUS PUBLISHER MOUSE PERISCOPE III 8 MHZ SPECIAL 995 1789 DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM 249 WPLUS PAINT CADIS PERISCOPE II110MHZ SPECIAL 1095 869 TOOLKIT 169 PFIX 86 PLUS SPECIAL 395 199 SOLIDB TOOLBOX NEW 99 89 DANBRICKLIN SDEMOPROGRAM 75 59 W PLUS CADD PUBL MOUSE DEMO PROGRAM II i95 185 W PLUS PAINT PUBL MOUSE DISK DOS KEYBOARDUTILITIES STONYBROOK MODULA 2 195 169 DB2C 399 CALL W PLUS PAINT CADD PUBL ADVANCED NORTON UTILITIES 150 99 W UTILITIES 345 299 FLOW CHARTING Il 229 ohn LOGITECH SERIES 2 W PLUS COMMAND PLUS NEWV 2 0 80 69 OBJECT ORIENTEDPROGRAMMING MAGIC PC 19
102. M1 lies at 3F8h 3FFh data at 3F8h it uses interrupt Ch COM2 lies at 2F8h 2FFh data at 2F 8h it uses interrupt Bh Programs access the serial ports by CONNECTOR DPDT SWITCH TO CROSS OR UNCROSS Rx amp Tx A PINS DB 25 B PINS DB 25 RS 232 Cable with Handshaking CTS DSR COMMON CTS DSR COMMON DCD MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 33 CLONE SYSTEMS One YEAR guarantee on system Turbo Mother Board 4 77 and 10 MHz 640 K Ram installed on board Serial Parallel Game Ports Clock Calendar AT Style Keyboard Color CGA or Monochrome Video Board 150 Watt Power Supply Flip Top Case ABOVE WITH 2 FLOPPY DISK DRIVES 599 00 WITH 1 FLOPPY AND 20 MEG WITH 2 FLOPPY AND 20 MEG 859 00 899 00 Assembled and Tested for 24 Hours AT TURBO SYSTEM AT COMPATIBLE MOTHER BOARD WITH BIOS 8 MEG AND 12 MEG SWITCHABLE SPEED 512K RAM INSTALLED UP TO 1024 ON BOARD WA2 HARD DISK FLOPPY DISK CONTROLLER MONOCHROME GRAPHICS VIDEO WITH PRINTER 1 2 MEG OR 360 K FLOPPY reading and writing locations in the I O space The PC can access via the microprocessor s address lines memory cells or I O input output cells I O ad dressing has different timing and hand shaking than memory addressing I O devices generally respond more slowly than memory as far as I can recall Not all microprocessors do this The Motorola 68000 family used in Macs Ataris Amigas and many Unix machines puts a
103. Next Issue National Advancement Corp they teach seminars on ser vicing XTs ATs etc says they ve discovered a fix for flaky Seagates You and I should see a major repair article from them including the Seagate fix in issue 42 FastCopy Every once in awhile a treasure shows up in the mail Sometimes it s a large four color box with manual disks and a cover letter from a corporate officer Other times it s a disk or two in a plain brown mailer FastCopy came in plain brown It came from Jim Nech its author and it s super It s easy to use very fast powerful everything It s every thing that MS DO s diskcopy should have been For instance you can load a disk into memory set the number of copies you want and start feeding blanks It for mats the destination disk if necessary automatically will verify the data can alternate between two floppy drives so you can put a disk in one while it s copying data to the other and it ll do it all very quickly If I were a user group librarian or distributor of user disks oh yeah I forgot and couldn t afford one of those fancy Complete 8MHz Monochrome System 995 e Fully compatible with IBM AT e Intel 80286 CPU 80287 socket e 512K Memory on 1MB motherboard e HD FD controller Battery Backed Clock Calendar 1 2 MB Teac Floppy Drive MaxiSwitch AT Keyboard e FCC Class B approved e 48 hour factory burn in and testing 12 Amber Monitor 720x350
104. No 41 May June 1988 3 95 T AE COR amp T E CAWN amp C AtL 7S OM RN AL 3 D Graphics AI Theory Three Dimensional Graphics Part 1 page 8 Earl Hinrichs uses high performance graphics IC to create and display depth Neural Networks page 16 Modeling human reasoning is the first step in creating a useful robot The Logic Of Programming Languages page 22 Proving that a language is logically valid beats testing it for 10 years Applying Information Theory page 42 Calculating the maximum theoretical data compression and then applying it Plus Updating The C Reviews page 48 RS 232 Interfacing page 30 Button s Great Sharev page 58 Marketi And Much Mu nams OF me TM N VERY HIGH RESOLUTION The PC Tech COLOR and MONOCHROME video processor boards employ the TMS 34010 high performance graphics co processor to insure the best possible video performance at reasonable prices Color 34010 Video Processor e Featured on the cover of Micro Cornucopia e From 800 x 512 through 1024 x 800 resolution depending on monitor and configuration e 8 Bits per pixel for 256 simultaneous colors e Hardware support for CGA MDA emulation e PC XT and AT compatible The PC Tech Color 34010 video processor is a superior 34010 native code and DGIS development tool We support up to 4 megabytes of program non display 34010 RAM as well as up to 768K bytes of display RAM Compare our architecture
105. PEX loo 89 REPORT BUILDER 130 115 T DEBUG PLUS V 4 0 SPECIAL 45 39 W SOURCE NEW 90 79 TURBO ASM 99 69 TURBO ASYNCH PLUS 129 99 TURBO GEOMETRY LIBRARY NEW 100 89 LIST OURS LIST OURS LIST OURS TURBO HALO 99 85 386 SOFTWARE C LIBRARIES FILE MANAGEMENT TURBO MAGIC 99 89 386 TO THE MAX NEW 75 6 C ASYNCH MANAGER 175 135 BTRIEVE 245 185 TURBO POWER TOOLS PLUS 129 99 ADVANTAGE 386 C OR PASCAL 895 829 C FOOD SMORGASBORD 150 95 XTRIEVE 245 189 TURBO POWER UTILITIES 95 79 DESQVIEW 130 109 C TOOLS PLUS 5 0 129 99 REPORT OPTION 145 109 TURBO PROFESSIONAL 4 0 9 79 FOXBASE 386 595 CALL C UTILITY LIBRARY 185 125 BTRIEVE N 595 455 TURBOWINDOW PASCAL 5 79 HIGH C 386 NEW 895 835 ESSENTIALCOMMUNICATIONS 185 125 XTRIEVE N 595 459 MICROPORT SYSTEM COMMUNICATIONS PLUS 250 189 REPORT OPTION N 345 269 SCREENS WINDOWS V 386 COMPLETE 799 679 GREENLEAF C SAMPLER 95 69 CBTREE 159 139 C SCAPE 279 265 MS WINDOWS 386 SPECIAL 195 125 GREENLEAF COMM LIBRARY 185 125 C TREE 395 315 CURSES W SOURCE CODE 250 169 NDP C OR FORTRAN 386 NEW 595 545 GREENLEAF FUNCTIONS 185 125 R TREE 295 239 GREENLEAF DATA WINDOWS 225 155 PHARLAP 386IASM LINK 495 419 MULTI C 149 135 C TREE R TREE BUNDLE 650 519 W SOURCE CODE 395 259 SCO XENIX SYS V 386 COMPLETE 1495 1195 PFORCE 295 215 D TREE NEW 395 CALL HLSCREEN XL 149 119 VM 386 SPECIAL 245 179 RESIDENT C W SOURCE 198 169 DBCIII 250 169 JYACCFORMAKER 495 449 X AM 595 535 TIMESLICER SPECIAL 295 269 DBC III PLUS 750 595 JYACCJAM 750 679 TURBO C TOOLS 12
106. Pascal program which in sures that Uncle Sam doesn t get more than his fair share After putting in all the finan cial data that you of course have fully or ganized and ready to input the program chews on the data for a few seconds then proudly informs you that you still owe the IRS 7 324 857 82 Since you re not Chairman of General Motors you suspect something s amiss You ve tested each of your subroutines and UNITs during development so where do you go from here Debugging like the original coding should be done in a logical and structured manner First isolate the problem area to minimize the number of routines that need to be examined The next step which is also the least effective is to reexamine the source Look for things like parameters mistakenly passed by value unini tialized variables missing calculations and the like Next add output statements to indicate the progress of the program At critical or suspect points put in a sequence of statements of this form WriteLn In Procedure CriticalProc Taxes Taxes RestartCh ReadKey This technique of course has it s disad vantages it involves repeatedly editing compil ing and running the program to check each sec tion The program will be larger Also the in formational writes will most likely interfere with other screen output If your program uses graphics it may be very inconvenient to use this method Perha
107. Prolog but you C and Pascal programmers should have little trouble extrapolating to your favorite language If you just want to see Chaos without programming it grab CHAOS EXE from the Micro C Bulletin Board BGI I ve only had a few days to work with BGI but I ve already found it to be easy to use and powerful In order to generate Chaos and to get BGI up and running in general you need to Initialize the graphics system Figure 1 Turbo Prolog Chaos include tdoms pro include tpreds pro include linemenu pro Database graphics Determ driver Integer Integer String Determ maxcolors Integer Determ maxX Integer Determ maxY Integer Determ aspectCorr Real Determ graphCoord Integer Integer Real Real PREDICATES GetDriverName Integer String Initialize KeepColor Integer Integer Integer ToGrapHic ToText params Real Real Real Real Real Real Real Set foreground and background colors Set a ViewPort or window for graphic display And draw You can set a device driver to enable EGA or Hercules compatibility for example or use a BGI predicate or function to determine which graphics display is online For a demonstration of the latter check out the Micro C RBBS or get the Issue 41 disk 6 for subscribers 8 for non subscribers and foreign Borland supplies drivers for EGA CGA MCGA VGA Hercules AT amp T 400 line 3270 PC and IBM 8514 graphics
108. RANTEE MICROCORNUCOPIA 40 Mar April 1988 95 By Gary Entsminger 1912 Haussler Dr Davis CA 95616 Machinery Of The Mind In purest form Artificial Intelligence re searchers attempt to recreate human intelligence in machines or computers This form seems to have gotten lost in the commercialization of AI At our level user hobbyist AI seems to mean fancy programming which sells better ancy programming has little more to do with better programming than it has to do with Artificial Intelligence Bet ter programming obviously comes from better ideas and better ways of implementing them According to George Johnson in his well re searched history of AI Machinery Of The Mind available from Microsoft Press Artificial Intelligence is based on the assumption that the mind can be described as some kind of for mal system manipulating symbols that stand for things in the world Thus it doesn t matter what the brain is made of or what it uses for tokens in the great game of thinking Using an equivalent set of tokens and rules we can do thinking with a digital computer just as we can play chess using cups salt and pepper shakers knives forks and spoons Using the right software one system the mind can be mapped onto the other the computer In this form AI leads to interesting ideas about us our minds how we think Again from Johnson Ultimately when all the detail
109. RES A COM SERIAL PORT BOARD MAY ALSO BE USEDINA STAND ALONE ENVIRONMENT WITH ALMOST ANY COMPUTER THAT HAS A RS232 SERIAL PORT FEATURES ON BOARD AUDIO AMP OR MAY BE USED WITH EXTERNAL AMPS DEMONSTRATION SOFTWARE AND A LIBRARY BUILDING PROGRAM ARE INCLUDED ON A5 INCH PC XT DISKETTE FULL DOCUMENTA TION AND SCHEMATICS ARE ALSO INCLUDED m 6995 cv NEW act a TESTED NEW IC TESTER 149 00 SIMILAR TO BELOW EPROM PROGRAMMER PLUGS IN TO YOUR PC OR XT TESTS ALMOST ALL 14 16 AND 20 PIN 74XX SERIES INCLUDES STANDARD POWER S AND LS DEVICES ALSO TESTS CD4000 SERIES CMOS SOFTWARE INCLUDED CAN EVEN DETERMINE PART NUMBERS OF MOST UNMARKED AND HOUSE NUMBERED DEVICES WITH SIMPLE MOD THIS UNIT CAN ALSO TEST 6 4K AND 256K DRAMS WITH MANUAL AND SOFTWARE 149 PERFECT FOR SCHOOLS PC XT EPROM ASK ABOUT PROGRAMMER OUR NEW 169 PROGRAMMER LATEST DESIGN PROGRAMS UP TO 4 DEVICES AT ONE TIME x FEATURES EASY TO USE MENU DRIVEN SOFTWARE THAT RUNS UNDER PC OR MS DOS USES AN INTELLIGENT PROGRAMMING ALGORITHM FOR SUPER FAST 8X EPROM BURNING THIS PLUG IN BOARD ATTACHES TO AN EXTERNAL MINI CHASSIS CONTAINING 4 TEXTOOL Z1 F SOCKETS NO PERSONALITY MODULES REQUIRED AUTOMATIC VPP SELECTION 12 5V 21V OR 25V x EPROM DATA CAN ALSO BE LOADED FROM OR SAVED TO A DISKETTE x PROGRAMMING SOFTWARE SUPPORTS 2716 2732 2732A 2764 2764A 27128 27128A 27256 27256A
110. Range The prettiest follows Interstate 5 from Portland to Salem and then Highway 20 from Salem to Bend Reserve a couple of extra hours for exploring and picnicking along the North Santiam River Graphics Snafus Desktop publishing is going along quite well At least the text part is The graphics end still has problems I purchased a Microtek MSF 300C scanner after our bor rowed HP scanner was repossessed I chose the Microtek be cause it was Editor s choice in PC Magazine ae neon ees New PC MS DOS CP M 86 ROM Superior performance a powertul new array of features and utilities ba and pricing that is unmatched make the new Aztec C86 the first choice of serious software developers Aztec C86 p LLLI EI eesseteeses 99 e optimized C with near far huge small and large memory Inline assembler Inline 8087 80287 ANSI support Fast Float 32 bit optimization options e Manx Aztec 8086 80x86 macro assembler Aztec overlay linker rna model source level debugger object librarian 3 x file sharing amp locking comprehensive libraries of UNIX DOS Screen Graphics and special run time routines Aztec C86 d ssssssssssss 9299 includes all of Aztec C86 p Unix utilities make diff grep vi editor 6 memory models Profiler Aztec C86 C csscssesrereeee 499 e includes all of Aztec C86 d Source for library routines e ROM Support CP M 86 support One year of updates Thir
111. TED SIGNAL BITS ARE TURNED INTO SOUNDS WHEN YOU CONNECT TWO COMPUTERS DIRECTLY WITH NO NULL MODEM COMPUTER DTE THE TRANSMITTED SIGNAL AT THIS END MUST STILL BE THE RECEIVED SIGNAL AT THIS END WHEN YOU CONNECT A COMPUTER TO SOMETHING ELSE 1489 don t work reliably at or 5 volts The Commodore 64 contains simple transistor level shifters in place of the 1488 and 1489 The Commodore s RS 232 interface doesn t work with all serial devices The other handshake and clock lines on the RS 232 interface use the same volt age levels as the data lines but their sense is backwards On these lines a positive voltage represents a logic one and a negative voltage represents a logic zero Signal generators assume they ll be driving 3K 7K ohms Thus they have to supply between 2 and 5 mA Most line drivers and receivers are capable of sup plying between 10 and 20 mA The maximum recommended cable length for RS 232C is 50 feet without repeaters The maximum standard sig 32 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 IF THE OTHER DEVICE IS USE A DCE STRAIGHT CABLE DTE CROSSED CABLE naling rate is 20K bits per second this is why 19 2K baud is a common limit Editor s note In the last couple of years we ve seen the maximum rate move to 56K baud and higher The NON Standard It s a tribute to human ingenuity to see how many non modem things people found to hang on to an RS 232C port Trouble was
112. There s something magic about climbing into a Stin son a fabric and frame tail dragger that s pushing the ragged side of 40 And there s even more magic when I bring to life its cranky old Franklin engine six giant cylinders 165 horses sounding every bit like 600 Forty years ago Stinsons were fast but since then the rest of the world has more than caught up They were once the most popular plane in the air Now they re rare enough to be a curiosity and wherever one goes a group gathers A friend had one of these Once I built a model Stinson when I was in the fifth grade Or was it the sixth grade I ve always dreamed of flying in one Do you still fly it Occasionally a burled hand gently presses the var nished fabric The hand remembers another Stinson perhaps The plane is quiet too It used to have a wooden prop I tell them But a rough landing shortened it a bit That happened before the Stinson and I met and I ve often wondered how it flew with that hand rubbed wood grained prop Better I think You can tell the pilots from the non pilots Pilots know that props suffer occasionally and let it pass Non pilots glance at the gray metal replacement and then casually move away They needn t worry I m not offering rides I remember one afternoon I was preparing to depart from a wind torn coastal airstrip and was trying to wrestle the Stinson away from a fence when a gna
113. We can describe a direction by D Dx Dy Dz where Dx Dy and Dz are the directions with respect to each axis Point and direction defined this way x t a x 2 save registers which hold intermediate stest for negative argument if negative refuse to compute square Iteration limit we 1ll be done long before this Starting interation value Remember what number we re square Start of iteration loop Get a sand current x a0 x a4 a x a4 a x 2 compare with old x sort of igive or take a bit 7if not stable repeat result to a0 a x t x restore some registers P Q Px Qx Py Qy Pz Qz If P and Q are points then P Q is the vector which starts at Q and goes to P Two types of multiplication are use ful in vector arithmetic one for multi plying a vector by a number the other for multiplying two vectors The first is called multiplication by a scalar Each coordinate of the vector is multiplied by the number c p c Px c Py c Pz Geometrically this corresponds to stretching or shrinking the vector The length of the vector changes but the direction does not The second type of multiplication is called the inner or dot product Here two vectors are multiplied and the result is a scalar or number The cor responding coordinates are multiplied and the products are summed P e Q Px Qx Py Qy Pz Qz The length of a vector denot
114. a0 al movi One a0 m r calla fxDivide invert size t gt 0 is time move ad a9 l callr vScale then scale In a strict mathematical setting t is mmfm sp a8 a9 a10 just a number and we say that t rets parameterizes the points on the ray By the way if we also allow t lt 0 then the above formula represents a line END OF LISTING MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 13 A Plane An arbitrary plane in space can be specified by designating a point on the plane and a vector perpendicular to the plane The point is the origin and is denoted O Ox Oy Oz The perpen dicular vector is called the normal and is denoted N Nx Ny Nz l An arbitrary point P Px Py Pz lies on the plane if the vector which starts at O and goes to P is perpen dicular to N The dot product can be used to determine when two vectors are per pendicular A point P lies on the plane determined by the origin O and normal N if P 0 N 0 A little algebra here will save us some time later on The above formula will be the basis of a computerized test of whether a point lies on a particular plane Consider the following equivalent forms 0 Sooo and 6800 2 8 9 SOFTWARE SK DOS a powerful DOS for the 6809 75 or the 68000 140 incl an editor assembler Basic utilities code for a boot ROM etc HUMBUG a monitor boot ROM 50 75 OTHER SYSTEM SOFT WARE including assem blers text form
115. ace Pointers Most programming languages have a data type called a pointer which con tains a memory address The size of a Figure i Memory Model Sizes Memory Model Tiny Compact Code Addresses Data Addresses RELL LAL ELE RAE LEAL LEE LE NEI code and data share one segment Small e2 l near near Medium Program far near Compact Data near far Large far far Huge E far address Two different segment and of fset pairs can point to the same memory location There are 65 536 possible segments each 16 bytes apart We call these 16 byte chunks paragraphs MS DOS aligns its memory areas on paragraph boundaries and allocates memory in 16 byte multiples Near And Far Due to the complex nature of memory addresses come in two types near and far A near address is a single 16 bit word containing an offset within the current 64K segment A far address con sists of two words one a segment the other an offset Near addresses don t change the seg ment usually stored in one of the processor s segment registers The CS register contains the current executable pointer depends on the memory model In the Medium model pointers to procedures and functions code are two words long containing a far address The data pointer is only one word long containing a near address Thus the Medium model is very efficient for programs with large amounts of code but relatively smal
116. action is our main concern if within 60 days of purchase this product does not perform in accordance with our claims call our customer service department and we will arrange a refund All Borland products are trademarks or registered trademarks of Borland International Inc Other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders Copyright 1987 Borland international inc BI 1179
117. ails for 2795 will sell for 1 450 00 OBO Call Michael Crandell 805 969 6851 CASINO CARD GAME PAC POPUP VT100 EMULATOR POPUP TIME amp BILLING DES SECURE ENCRYPTION 59 BBS amp REMOT ACCESS QUICK DATABASE amp MAIL STOCK TRADING SYSTEM Demo 49 IBM PC Compatibles GUARANTEED SATISFACTION or your Money Back Dont Delay Get Our Free Catalogue Today Box 1400 OLDSMAR FLORIDA 33557 Hawkeye Grafix Inc Dial 813 855 5846 Before you code The Idea Generators Quickens and improves problem solving InfoWorld Usually 195 For you 145 Experience in Software Inc 2039 Shattuck Ave Berkeley CA 94704 415 644 0694 Reader Service Number 63 Want to Throw Out your U P S Log Book Now You Can Here s what EASY SHIP can do for you Automatic U P S Shipping to all of U S amp Canada Fast Easy Multiple Shipments with All Options U P S Approved Shipping Labels amp C O D tags Access to your ASCII Customer Data File U P S Approved Reports and Manifest Summary Approved Nationally by United Parcel Service NO MORE MANUAL LOGGING And more For all IBM PC AT OS 2 Systems Only 365 3 S H Stat Supply Company 20214 Brondesbury Katy TX 77450 800 666 4567 or 713 492 1931 CBASIC CB80 CB86 USERS Convert your Chasic and Cbasic compiler programs into C with MB86 MB86 supports Access Manager Display Manager and allows your new C programs to use existing CB86 data file
118. alid X Scale 0 NextProcess 6 shiftwindow 2 write YStart readreal YS params A B C D E F G H I YScale E YS YScale lt gt 0 retract params A B C D E F G H I asserta params A B C YS E YScale G H I NextProcess 6 shiftwindow 2 write Invalid Y Scale 0 NextProcess 7 shiftwindow 2 write YEnd readreal YE params A B C D E F G H I YScale YE D YScale lt gt 0 retract params A B C D E F G H I asserta params A B C D YE YScale G H I NextProcess 7 shiftwindow 2 write Invalid Y Scale 0 I F G H F G H Inc GOAL assert params 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 04 3 0 0 003 Main END OF LISTING Technical Tips Logitech Zenith Compatibility Laine Stump complained recently Micro C issue 40 p 58 about incompatibility between Logitech s C7 Serial Mouse and the Zenith Z181 laptop I also own both units Calls to Zenith and Logitech identified the problem as the source of power to the Logitech mouse The mouse receives power from the RS232 port Zenith has confirmed that their serial driver chip does not provide as much voltage as the chips used by other manufac turers This conserves battery power I suggest that anyone who wishes to use a Logitech mouse with the Zenith laptop add a serial to serial interface which would supply the necessary power to the mouse I ve thought about connecting the required 1488 a
119. am is only used occasionally I don t mind typing in the lt and gt redirection operators If it is an everyday utility however I would recode with VIEW C to check for file name arguments as part of the com mand line And failing that to prompt for them Since the output of the program is going to stdout which is more likely to be redirected to a file than sent to the screen we must send operator messages to stderr which is always the console This avoids their burial within the output file Because fgets in IOLIB ASM was still buggy I used getline from Kernighan and Ritchie to fetch the input lines Besides getline returns the length of the text line it fetches eliminating the need for strlen As in VIEW C none of the functions in LIBASM C are needed nor is LIBASM C appended Tabbing ENTAB C see Figure 2 which replaces spaces with equivalent tabs takes the same ap proach as NOCMNT C with respect to input and output Note that this version of the compiler does not support redirection to or from a device only to or from a file For example if you at tempt to send the output to a printer with gt LST you will get a disk file named LST but you will not be able to TYPE REName ERAse or PIP Most aggravating You can however use a disk editor like DU to go into the directory and change the name byte by byte to something CP M recognizes as a file name The algorithm comes fro
120. ames of all of the com peting programs Be sure to leave room for your package Along the X axis jot down all of the important features and benefits For instance if you re designing a data base you should have a column for the maximum number of records a column for variable or fixed length records a column for the maximum length of each record etc Be sure and leave a number of columns unlabeled You ll think of more after the literature comes in Also include a column to track how long it takes the companies to send you literature and how often they call A Speech tn ON HO eNO Uist The columns in the matrix need to address all of the four Ps of the market ing mix Product Price Promotion Place See Figure 1 The list isn t complete it s just to get you started Note however that product price and promotion are the most important Phoning After you have completed a prelimi nary cut of the matrix analysis it s time to get on the phone Start with the magazines Talk to the authors of ar ticles covering your type of software Place how sold coverage Promotion advertisement how sold Check with columnists and editors who have mentioned your competitors products Keep in mind that these people are busy don t expect them to spend hours discussing the pros and cons of every package Write down the questions ahead of time and then pare them down to five minutes worth Always ask t
121. and display the debugging screen This initial screen has two windows one for the source which has the next statement to be executed highlighted and the command window Within the text window you can scroll back and forth through the source view other source files and dis play a symbolic disassembly of the machine code When in assembly mode another window opens which shows the current values of all the CPU registers this window can also be ac tivated in the source mode The watch window is opened when ever you watch a variable it is ex panded and contracted as watch vari ables are added or deleted The watch window is updated periodically to in sure the values displayed are correct The final window is the memory window It allows you to monitor an area of memory normally a data area and is updated whenever you return to the debug screen Permanent breakpoints and passpoints are set with the P command These are monitored for all the tracing commands Temporary breakpoints are set either with the tracing commands or with the B command The B command is used to monitor a variable for change or reaching target value or to monitor a range of memory for change Program execution is initiated fol lowed with the tracing commands e T lt n gt executes lt n gt statements in either source or assembly mode The assembly mode is fun it ll teach you a lot about your compiler e N executes t
122. any mistakes you make along the way and I ve made just about every one often more than once there s still no thrill like seeing the source code you ve labored and puzzled over come alive ready to do your bidding at the press of a few keystrokes Of course the thrill is there in any language but Small C is special It belongs to the hacker community and not to the commercial interests By using it you re helping to keep a remarkable tradition alive 1 The puts function supplied as part of IOLIB ASM does not respond properly to the newline escape sequence n sending only a bare carriage return rather than the car riage return line feed pair that CP M expects The func tions fputs putchar and fputc by contrast all respond properly to n To correct this problem edit the file IOLIB ASM to add the instructions shown here added instructions are marked with PUTS1 POP H A A PUT E H H D save char on stack retrieve char mask parity bit is it a CR no loop for next char else send line feed 4 amp amp HF HF 76 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 2 When reading a disk file fgets fails to terminate as it is supposed to when a carriage return is encountered and continues reading characters until the maximum number of characters is read This plays havoc with programs doing line oriented input To cure the problem change the one instruction in the
123. arbeque Adult i Adult 12 00 Chla Saturday night SOG Banquet Child 7 00 Semi Official SOG T shirt 7 00 Adult sizes Small Medium Large Ex large f Semi Official SOG T shirt Youth sizes Small Medium Large es O Check enclosed Register by July 1st TOTAL Number attending in your group ENCLOSED NUMBER Exp____ Signature Card No Name Company Address City State Zip MICRO CORNUCOPIA P O BOX 223 BEND OR 97709 503 382 5060 Come join us and learn more about C compilers and C tools Trilogy A new Al language Advanced graphic processors Super fast ray tracing on the 34010 graphics processor Fractals Diagnostic software available for the XT and AT and how to use it Disk diagnostics Pseudo concurrancy using probablistic technique Numerical applications Desktop publishing All about SCSI Generic microprocessors Packet radio and much much more New Users Disks ro Cornucopia MS49 PC CALC and Extended DOS This 64 column X 256 row spreadsheet can import its data from any number of PC File databases Or you can treat it as a normal spreadsheet and enter data b MS45 PC Flle sei Dive right into this database manager Context sensitive help screens will guide you through the entire process The program is complete but this evaluation copy s documentation contains only portions of the manual These new Micro C PC File includes macro capability H H Extended DOS
124. arn or just for recreation you should write all your own procedures and units The best way to learn a language is to use it If you are pressed for time or are programming for pay it makes more sense to take advantage of the commer cial add ons why reinvent the wheel Also since source is usually included the routines can be modified or used as models for your own routines I ll intro duce you to two of the packages I ve been looking at recently and in later columns will look at others Borland s Graphix Toolbox The whole series of toolboxes for Turbo Pascal has been upgraded for use with version 4 This time I ll look at the graphics package I must admit I was a bit disap pointed with this upgrade I expected it to be a total revision of the version for Turbo 3 Instead the package is basical ly the same with the exception that it uses linkable OBJ modules for the dis play adapters rather than include files It seems to be a step backwards from the device independent graphics sup MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 67 port of the version 4 compiler package to the device dependent nature of this toolbox Of course to be fully display independent all of the drivers must be present when your program initializes the graphics system but that s better than needing several versions of the program Grumbles aside if you need support for multiple screen windows in a graphics environment high level pl
125. ase where the alternatives aren t identically possible We saw that if there are for example 8 identical possibilities the uncertainty associated with the situation is log 8 s_bits So when we receive a message con firming any one of the 8 the amount of information conveyed is log 8 and since they re equally possible it makes sense to say that the average amount of informa tion conveyed by the receipt of a series of different messages selected from this set is also log 8 Another way of looking at this is to say that since there are 8 equally possible messages the chances or probability as MAILBASE SYSTEM Productivity Software for DBase Wordstar Ventura Publisher e Letters forms contracts e Production e Record keeping Grouped repeated work variations e Secretarial or professional use e Meeting management Desktop input e dBASE file organizer Develop your own specialized system with no pro gramming e Constant or on the fly formatting Stackware with standard programs Painless construction of general letters customized contracts tabbed tables for Ventura Publishers etc from dBASE or Ill files Use any version dBASE amp Wordstar MM Track meeting participants contracts business letters automatically make action summaries Over 5 years of practical development Never again type anything twice MS PC DOS but also an Apple Il CPM Softcard version not 7 5 4 disks FEATURES
126. ast assembler is included free Anonymous SOG VI CBTREE source library 159 The following are general purpose disassem Object library only 49 blers Masterful Disassembler Z 80 45 00 Masterful Disassembler IBM PC 47 50 This limited time offer is simply too good to refuse Peacock s standard Z UNREL relocatable files 8080 45 00 ROYALTY FREE UNCONDITIONAL MONEY BACK GUARANTEE AND FREE TECHNICAL SUPPORT applies to this offer Shipping Handling 1 50 Tax Total All products are fully guaranteed Disk format 8 g 5 O type C C Software 1907 Alvarado Ave Walnut Creek CA 94596 415 939 8153 VISA MC check card expires To order or for additional information call 703 356 7029 or 703 847 1743 or write PEACOCK SYSTEMS INC 2108 GALLOWS ROAD SUITE C VIENNA VA 22180 PEACOCK SYSTEMS INC Trademarks Turbo C Borland Quick C Microsoft Lete C Mark Williams DeSmet Software Datalight Datalight Lattice C Lattice Microsoft C Microsoft Aztec C Manx Software Computer Innovations C Com puter Innovations Eco C Ecosoft inc Reader Service Number 20 Noah Boards The ARC When last we left the archiving scene the deluge of ARCing and de ARCing programs was well upon us See All Aboard the ARC in the Nov Dec 1987 Micro C issue 38 Now shareware author John J Newlin volunteers to take the helm What could he have in mind Ve
127. ate the function each time putting XNext in for X we ll discover that XNext reaches some equilibrium some ex pected value That is we ll find that it reaches an expected value some of the time but not al ways In fact not only will it not reach an expected value some of the time but it will explode into bizarre patterns and shapes eventually leading to and through Chaos or totally unexpected values The key to how the function behaves is R At low R values up to 3 the function is pre dictably predictable But at R values between 3 and 4 anything can happen and perhaps most significant anything can happen after very sub tle or minute changes in R For example at 3 8284 a basic cycle of 3 first appears at 3 8415 it becomes unstable at 3 99026 a basic cycle of 5 appears at 3 99030 it becomes unstable and so on The subtlety in variation is virtually infinite This effect of small changes in behavior often generations before leading to significant changes is known as the butterfly ef fect and has subtle implications in na ture If you re interested in pursuing this fascinating subject I enthusiastically recommend James Gleick s new book Chaos the first full length feature study of this new science which promises to affect many different areas of science Meanwhile I ll briefly show you how to simulate Chaos on your PC using the Borland Graphics Interface I m using it with Turbo
128. atters editors spell checkers languages etc all very reasonable HARDWARE A wide selection of single board computers and sys tems from 275 COMBINATIONS Package deals of fast and powerful computer plus DOS and more from 350 STar K SOFTWARE SYSTEMS CORP BOX 209 MT KISCO NY 10549 914 241 0287 Reader Service Number 40 14 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 To the mathematician any one of these is as good as any other The programmer however will prefer the last form solving for t t c Se N DN Figure 5 Ray Definition N The questions of intersection will be answered by when rather than where The time parameter t will be Imagine a rectangle in space in a standard orientation see Figure 6 and suppose the edges are parallel to the X Figure 6 Plane and Rectangle Definition O O and N are part of the definition of the plane So the quantity O e N is fixed for any given plane Set c O N and then compute c when the plane is defined The test for whether a point lies on a plane then becomes PeN c The next question we ask is where does an arbitrary ray intersect the plane Recall that a ray is determined by a starting point S and a direction D and the ray consists of all points P where P S t D for some number t gt 0 Thus we see a ray intersects a plane when S t D N c used to identify intersection In ray traci
129. atterson Caledonia MI 49316 616 791 9333 Reader Service Number 75 8051 SIMULATOR Superb full function debugger simulator supports all 8051 modes of interrupt just like the real thing Full disassembler and many unique features ONLY 150 00 CROSS ASSEMBLERS For Z80 8080 8085 8048 8051 and 8096 still 75 00 each LEAR COM COMPANY 2440 KIPLING ST SUITE 201 LAKEWOOD CO 80215 303 232 2226 Reader Service Number 84 GRAPHICS TOOLKIT COMPATIBLE WITH PC XT AT eee PS e2 59 95 DEERE INTRODUC SUPPORTS NEW VGA GRAPHICS MODES 5 FUNCTIONS DATA COMPRESSION ALGORITHM ALL SOURCE CODE INCLUDED NO ROYALTIES ROUTINES WRITTEN IN MICROSOFT AND ASSEMBLER BUFFER amp DISK SAVE RESTORE PROGRAMMER SUPPORT PROVIDED CADD 3 S H DEVTRONICS INC 1571 MAIN STREET D ATLANTIC BEACH FLA 3522353 ORDERS ONLY 1 800 332 4250 AMEX COD TECHNICAL INQUIRIES 904 241 3281 Reader Service Number 86 RAM DISK S 100 2 Meg Port I O New Warranteed 725 S Lugert 439 Peck Slip or call NY NY 10272 718 622 0654 Reader Service Number 52 A Ventilation System designed to prolong the life of IBM PC PC XT Coldblue fits in the IBM enclosure as much as 27 F by increasing airflow across the card area The one that really works 18 Mandrili Corp i PO Box 33848 San Antonio TX 78265 800 531 5314 Dealers inquiries welcome Reader Service Number 91 68000 SOFTWARE e K
130. cabinet power supply monographics card amber or green monitor keyboard switchable turbo 1595 00 HARD DRIVES amp CONTROLLERS AT 40 MB Seagate 251 1 495 00 AT Hard Drive amp floppy controller WD 140 00 20 MB Miniscribe HD with controller 0605 349 00 30 MB Miniscribe HD with controller 5668 399 00 SOFTWARE The Twin Spreadsheet 49 00 Leading Edge Word ProcesSSOL criei aoieanna aiies 49 00 Ventura Desktop Publisher by Xerox 55 525 00 Turbo C by Borland 89 00 Turbo Pascal V4 ceeeeeee es 89 00 ACCESSORIES 1200 Baud Modem Internal Leading Edge Model L Hayes compatible 99 00 2400 Baud Modem Internal Leading Edge Model L Hayes compatible 219 00 1200 Baud Modem External Hayes compatible 119 00 V20 8mhz o e 14 00 Memory Chips call for prices BUILDING YOUR OWN CLONE FREE BOOKLET 90 day warranty 30 day money back subject to restrictions MicroSphere Inc P O Box 1221 Bend Oregon 97709 503 388 1194 Hours Monday Friday 9 00 5 30 Pacific Time THE MICRO TECHNICAL JOURNAL VUCRO CORNUCOPIA MAY JUNE 1988 ISSUE NO 41 FEATURES 16 22 30 36 42 Earl Hinrichs 48 C ing Clearly Graphics In 3 D Part 1 Scott Ladd updates his review of C packa
131. can be pushed and popped on and off the stack Since ch is so heavily used I declared it locally Names I got bitten by two of my variable names In my first attempt at the PAIR program I named the counters for S and B as ctrl_s and ctrl_b respectively The compiler had absolutely no problem with these names which are after all perfectly legal C names But global variables create assembly lan guage labels of the same name And ASM doesn t like the underline charac ter Had ctrl_s and ctrl_b been local however this would not have been a problem Local variables are stored on the stack and there is no assembly lan guage label created In this case I left them global for the sake of efficiency and simply changed the name to a form ASM could live with Incidentally Hendrix s book has an extensive chap ter on Small C efficiency considerations I recommend it highly Editor s note A limited supply of The Small C Handbook by James E Hendrix is available from Micro C for 17 95 postage paid in the U S Screen Output The messages to the screen could have been output more simply by using puts rather than fputs However the puts function supplied in IOLIB ASM has a bug which prevents it from responding properly to the newline es cape sequence n Additionally it does not automatically append a newline to the string being output You can fix the bug see Figure 3 but remember puts stil
132. change the active variables or constants and search for an entirely different solu tion Using Eureka s windows you can solve up to 20 equations at once It s all done with pull down menus full help screens and abso lutely no agony And all for just 167 System Requirements For the IBM PS 2 and the IBM and Compaq families of personal computers and all 100 compatibles PC DOS MS DOS 2 0 and later 384K Eureka The Solver Eureka instantly solved this Physics equation by immediately calculating how much work is required to compress isobarically 2 grams of oxygen initially at STP to 1 2 its original volume In Science Engineering Finance and any application involving equa tions Eureka gives you the right answer right now Easy as a Calculator Powerful as a Mainframe Pull down menus Full screen text editor Context sensitive help On screen calculator Automatic 8087 math coprocessor support Inequality constraints Powerful built in and user defined math and financial functions m Report generation com plete with plots and lists Polynomial root finder 11 Merely difficult problems Eureka solved virtually instantaneously the almost impossible took a few seconds Stephen Randy Davis PC Magazine 99 N For the dealer nearest you or to order call F SS BORLAND 800 543 7543 NTERNAT NA 60 Day Money back Guarantee Reader Service Number 1 lly I Customer satisf
133. cial kind of poke called Simulated annealing to get out of local minima in order to settle into the globally minimum state or close to it The trick is in how the interconnection weights are updated To program a Boltzmann Machine you must set up an Annealing Schedule and then run through the Learning Procedure First the Annealing Schedule The Annealing Schedule is a set of temperatures T and time units t as shown in the box below Annealing Schedule Run the model for ti time units at Tq decreasing tq increasing temperature Ti The Tq is the equilibrium temperature Initially the schedule might look like the one shown below As the learning progresses the 9 2 5 3 3 2 1 8 0 5 2 2 4 6 10 temperatures in the schedule can be changed after every phase using energy of unclamped units in phase Ti S unclamped units inphase 3 4 i 3 20 a relation that we find works Learning Procedure 1 Set the Annealing Schedule 2 PHASE The Teaching Phase a Clamp the input elements to the input neurons and the output elements to the output neurons b Randomize the states of all the un clamped hidden neurons c For each temperature Tj not the equi librium temperature in the Annealing Schedule run the Boltzmann machine for t time units After every time unit update the state of each unclamped neuron k using the probability decision rule 1 1 exp Ex Ti
134. ciated with printf and will go a long way toward keeping your programs compact printf Replacement You can have formatted output without printf however COUNT C also on the Micro C RBBS and Issue 41 disk is an adaptation of the familiar word counting program from The C Programming Language Since Small C has short integers and since the number of characters in even a moderately large text file could well ex ceed the maximum signed integer value of 32 767 I declared the counting variables to be character pointers even though they are used like integers Small C while it does not have an ex plicit unsigned integer type treats pointers as unsigned integers which can have a maximum value of 65 535 To print out these unsigned values I PUTSRET RET JMP PUTS1 used the function itou from the Small C library along with a separate function putnum The interface buries some of the complexity and makes it easier to understand Epilogue Well that s it enough examples for a month of Sundays They won t neces sarily make you an expert Small C programmer but a least you should be pointed in the right direction Now you can start working your way through the exercises in the many excellent books on C programming Proficiency in programming as in any other worthwhile human endeavor comes with practice So don t just read about C programming fire up your editor and start writing No matter how m
135. closed Fi NEW INTELLIGENT o a 2 LINKER Card Number Expiration Date Ww Signature LOGITECH Inc Name 6505 Kaiser Drive Fremont CA 94555 Address Tel 415 795 8500 Gyo Sate In Europe LOGITECH Switzerland Tel 41 21 87 9656 Telex 458 217 Tech Ch In the United Kingdom LOGITECH U K Turbo Pascal ts a registered trademark of Borland International VAN and VMS are tegistered trademarks of Dig Equipment Corp Tel 44908 368071 Fax 44908 7 175 Reader Service Number 12 Links only those routines from a particular module that you need so you eliminate unreferenced routines and proggice smaller more compact executable files Zip 4 The Mysteries Of RS 232 Success In This Field Requires Connections Asynchronous serial communication is definitely one of the weirder parts of per sonal computing Although RS 232 is a standard interface you can t just plug things together and expect them to work for cabling problems talk about RS 232 on the IBM PC and its clones try to dispel some of the mystery of com munications protocols and otherwise entertain you n this article I ll discuss my strategy What s Serial In serial communication you force all the information through a single wire one bit at a time Sounds strange doesn t it Instead of each bit in a byte having its own wire as on a parallel printer port each bit has to wait its turn on a single wire There a
136. col laborating He told me I was making him look like a skinflint by only asking 10 said But ton I suggested that he come down in his price He suggested that I come up to 25 His arguments were more persuasive than mine That was my first price hike Fluegelman also talked Button into adopting a name similar to that of PC Talk Button had been calling his program Easy File now it became PC File the name under which it became famous The nomenclature became standard for many later shareware products including ButtonWare s entire list of applications programs PC Type PC Calc PC Graph PC Stylist and PC Dial The software libraries of PC clubs be came one of shareware s major outlets Figures show that 19 of ButtonWare s customers learned of the products at users groups Another 38 learned of ButtonWare from a friend Thus user supported software is truly user sup ported with over half of the activity coming directly from user to user inter action How Did I Get Into This Mess Jim recounted his reluctant transition from IBM employee to shareware entrepreneur The returns from his hobby however finally so over shadowed his salary that he jumped In 1984 I left IBM and my wife stopped talking to me Communications resumed shortly thereafter as it became clear that Jim had made the right move Button s departure from Big Blue came one year after ButtonWare receive
137. creen on the market Running at a switchable 8 or z 10 MHz it includes a 20MB hard disk 304 floppy drive color monitor or a digital or composite monochrome monitor Included also is an external 5 4 floppy port for reading and converting to 3 2 disks 5 external drive w case power supply 179 when purchased with i Lap Top The McTek 286B 7 Lap Top comes fully assem parallel amp serial ports Award electroluminescently backlit 80 column by bled with our one year parts G 3 01 bios 640k turbo indicator 25 line LCD with adjustable intensity and labor guarantee and sells for LCD amp mouse interface The screen angle It s as readable as a CRT an amazing com 1 799 screen isa fantastically readable You can also plug in a digital or analog plete price Fore Our McTek 286A is the most integrated AT compatible to date 640k 4 77 8MHz and 4 77 10 switchable XT turboboards lt utilizes the highly regarded Chips amp Technology chip set and two 360k floppy disk drives with controller one parallel includes memory upgradable on board to 3 megabytes No more one serial and one game port AT style keyboard clock worries about speed compatibility with expanded memory cards FCC approved slide case eight slots Hercules compatible The 8 10MHz wait state McTek 286A runs at 11 5 Norton SI and 3 an effective 13 2MHz on the Landmark test Serial parallel amp game graphics card amber monitor w base
138. ctions Automatically handles memory saving and buffering of window text Use any number of overlapping windows in your applications Write to any window read from any window close any window pull any window fo the top Over 55 functions together with a big 85 page manual and remember you get the full source code Only 49 95 State Turbo C or Quick C version NC VIDEO Now learn C the easy way Get the Complete C Video Course from Zortech Inc together with our big 365 page workbook Ten 1 hour tapes 36 lessons Easy to follow course you get an excellent introduction to the C language Takes you step by step up to the intermediate and advanced levels Teach yourself at home or the office at your own speed eee eo eee ee eww ene coe eo oeoe N ZORTEC Eureka Instant Answers Now solving scientific and engineering equations goes from agonizing to easy Eureka The Solver and your PC can handle any problem you can hand them instantly Just type in any linear or non linear equation select Solve and look at your answer But that s not all because Eureka can do a lot more Like evaluate your solution and plot a graph Or generate a complete report sending the output to your screen disk file or printer You can check the equation itself or ask Kureka to continue searching iteratively for a satisfactory solution Or
139. d ASCII file transfer Hayes modem control VT52 VT100 and ANSI terminal emulation supports up fo 8 serial ports speeds up to 19 2k baud rate and higher Two demonstration programs are included MINICOM and MAXICOM like Procomm together with the 120 page manual and full source code FREE Only 49 95 State Turbo Cor QuickC version GAMES Have you ever wondered how to write a chess program Now we reveal the secret algorithms and techniques ofthe masters with this dynamic Games toolkit The package comes complete with the full source code to three ready to play games of strategy Chess Backgammon and Wari an ancient African game A comprehensive 150 page manual is provided giving anin depth look at the history structure and program AA design of such T Strategy Games Only 49 95 State Turbo C or Quick C version decenecrecccccescvcccccccccenenvasscesscsseseesossseososs ZORTECH Inc 361 Massachusetts Ave Arlington MA 02174 easccccccsscccccccecces eseoooososesococosoosococccosaceseeesessese toolkit but a full blown WordStar compatible wordprocessor with the full source code As well as all the normal i editing functions you will also find dot commands and full printer control The SuperText toolkit handles files of any size and allows full on screen configuration Do you need to incorporate a wordprocessor into your application Yes Then get the SuperText toolk
140. d Party Software A large array of support software is available for Aztec C86 Essential Graphics C Essentials Utility Library Greenleaf Com Greenleaf General Halo Panel e PC lint PforCe Pre C Windows for C e Windows for Data C terp db_Vista Phact Plink86Plus C tree C Prime PC MS DOS Macintosh Apple Il TRS 80 CP M These C development systems are unbeatable for the price They are earlier versions of Aztec C that originally sold for as much as 500 Each system includes C compiler assembler linker librarian UNIX routines and more Special discounts are available for use as course material C Prime essscsssssssovesensseensees 97D EEEn V EA UA w D A a Bhd ed Manx Software Systems One Industrial Way Eatontown NJ 07724 Aztec ROM Systems 6502 65C02 8080 Z80 8086 80x86 680x0 An IBM or Macintosh is not only a less expensive way to develop ROM code it s Targets include the 8080 Z80 8086 80x86 tter 6502 65C02 and 680x0 Aztec C has an excellent reputation for producing compact high performance code Our systems for under 1 000 outperform systems priced at over 10 000 Initial Host Plus Target 750 Additional Targets 9 500 ROM Support Package 500 Vax Sun PDP 11 ROM HOSTS Call for information on Vax PDP 11 Sun and other host environments Cross Development Most Aztec C systems are available as cross develo
141. d a major boost from PC World magazine Doug Clapp s rave review of PC File III appeared in the September 1983 issue and the small company s mailbox overflowed Aloha Success But Jim wasn t there to witness the event PC World appeared on the newsstands while the Button family was flying to Hawaii for a vacation After a few days Button called home to check with the high school student who was collecting their mail Where do you want me to put the bags asked the desperate boy He eventually filled the basement with grocery sacks full of mail It was right at the end of 1983 that PC File entered the software library of the Sacramento PC Users Group as it probably did the libraries of many other computer clubs It was the last volume prepared by my predecessor as software librarian Fluegelman s PC Talk was al ready part of the library though later withdrawn at the author s request When I included Bob Wallace s PC Write as my first addition to the library the Big Three of shareware were repre sented in our collection which then was only five disks By the time the Buttons had cleared away the backlog Jim had his wife and a son working for ButtonWare full time Ith each iteration Button adds new features Newly released PC Calc and version 2 0 of PC File can generate business charts from spreadsheets or databases Over the next four years ButtonWare grew to a twenty employee co
142. d for solving an amazing array of problems including but not limited to e Exploration in space planetary rover autonomous path selection recognition of signals from ex traterrestrials teleoperator con trols for building things in space space flight assistance design of large space structures like space stations pattern recognition image compression vector quan tization atmospheric modeling fast threat assessment damage tolerant space based computers e Military applications battle man agement target identification and recognition self guided tor pedoes submarine communica tions autonomous spacecraft cruise missile navigation surveil lance e Civilian applications vision ro botic control adaptive control prosthesis fingerprint identifica tion voice recognition telecom munications pattern recognition man machine interfaces associa tive memory robust or fault tolerant computers complex simulations of physical chemical biological systems language opti cal computing data processing We don t know yet whether neural nets simulated in software or built in hardware actually think but something awesome occurs when you watch one work Fun Reading Suggestions Amari S amp M A Arbib eds Com petition and Cooperation in Neural Nets Lecture Notes in Biomathematics Springer Verlag Berlin 1982 Forsyth R amp R Rada Machine Learn ing Applications in Expert Systems a
143. d more For you hardware people PC Tech will be there in force to talk about graphics and extended memory boards We ll continue with parallel processing and the transputer and delve into desktop publish ing fractals and packet radio SECOND ANNUAL BUILD YOUR OWN SYSTEM e Friday night MicroSphere will be hosting another Build Your Own Computer night at SOG This event will be held at MicroSphere starting at 7 p m Several participants in last year s class are now teaching XT construction classes at community colleges in their hometowns e They will be offering 8088 based XT 80286 based AT and 80386 kits at special SOG prices As with last year shipping the system home can be arranged Con tact Don Thompson or Cindy Johnson of MicroSphere at 503 388 1194 for more in formation and a registration form The SATURDAY NIGHT BANQUET is an all you can eat affair at the college Price is 12 for adults or 7 for children under 12 CHILD CARE There will be a supervised playroom for the kids Friday and Saturday from 9 4 DEADLINES All activites must be paid for by July 1 1988 SOG REGISTRATION 1988 _ EVENTS PRICE TOTAL Lo ell Thursday all day Raff trip amp Old Fashioned Barbeque ar Thursday 2 1 2 hour Raft trip amp Old Fashioned Barbeque Adult Thursday night Old Fashioned Barbeque only Adult 10 00 Child Included in Raft trips Child 6 00 Thursday Desktop Seminar 65 00 Includes lunch and B
144. dem we can say we ve received some information It also seems reasonable to say that the higher the uncertainty before we got the message the higher the quantity of information that has been conveyed by the message In other words we can measure the amount of information by the amount of uncertainty resolved by the message But how do we measure it Take the extreme case where there s only one possibility The outcome is cer tain so the uncertainty is zero And any message confirming this already certain outcome conveys absolutely zero infor mation But this still doesn t let us measure uncertainty precisely Recall the race how much more uncertainty is there in 32 than in 8 outcomes If you guessed 4 times as much you guessed wrong Is there 8 times as much uncertainty with 8 outcomes as with 1 outcome No With 1 outcome the un certainty is 0 and clearly it s unsatisfac tory to say that with 8 outcomes the un certainty is 8 times 0 or 0 as well Let s reconsider the race Instead of a message telling us which of the 32 horses has won suppose we group the horses into four groups A B C and D We then get a first message telling us which of the groups the winner is in followed by a second message telling us which of the 8 horses in that group is the winner The first message resolves our uncer tainty among 4 possible outcomes and the second resolves our uncertainty among 8 possible outcomes We c
145. divided by the 32 bit divisor Since that went so well let s try a square root which we can compute with the iterative formula shigh order bits jlow order bits signed integer division if the result of the previous operation was zero Otherwise it will decrement the a6 register and jump to fs_01 if a6 isn t zero There are also dsj and dsjeq instructions The first time I wrote 34010 code I found myself drowning in registers I was used to Intel CPUs which have a relative shortage of registers Some kind of convention on register usage has to be adopted to successfully write a 34010 program The subroutines in this article use the following conventions B registers are only used for the spe cial graphic operations Subroutines return values in the low A registers AO A3 Arguments which can be destroyed are sometimes passed in the low registers These registers are un defined when not used to return values Registers A4 A7 are used as local variables within a subroutine They re always saved and never used for pass ing arguments A8 A11 are used to pass arguments to a subroutine The values in A8 A11 are always preserved by the subroutine A12 A14 are used to pass arguments which may change The subroutine may change the value of these registers but not the meaning For example if a pointer is passed in A12 to a subroutine then the subroutine are examples of vectors You
146. e or read data on the bus The 8088 looks at READY at the end of T3 If it sees a low on READY the BIU inserts wait states Tw between T3 and T4 until the I O device signals its readi ness by releasing the READY line Bus Control How does the rest of the system know whether there s address or data on the multiplexed bus An 8288 bus controller lets everyone know Throughout the bus cycle the proces sor sends information to the 8288 via SO S1 and S2 The 8288 decodes these status lines according to Figure 3 and generates control signals for the rest of the system For example the following sequence would write a byte to memory During Ti the 8088 outputs a full 20 bits of ad dress to the system At the same time it drives SO low and leaves S1 and S2 high The 8288 decodes this combination of status signals and generates an address latch enable ALE An LS373 takes care of the demul tiplexing chores for AO through A7 It responds to ALE by latching storing the lower eight bits of address Another LS373 latches the upper eight bits of ad dress in response to the same signal One more main board signal effects address generation the address enable AEN Several system states can restrict access to the bus Lock hold and wait conditions all hold AEN high When any of these conditions occur AEN keeps the 8288 from issuing any signals Then when the bus again becomes available the system sends a low out
147. e paragraphs If you re not at all interested in programming you can easily skip the programming sections I ve separated each topic into theory and program I Taa ming parts and the programming sec tions can be skipped without losing the continuity of the theory section If you are a programmer you can use the 34010 examples as suggestions for creating a program on your favorite CPU or in your favorite language I as sume you have no prior knowledge of the 34010 and explain each 34010 in struction I use in the examples This isn t a 34010 primer The most interesting programming instructions such as pixblt operations XY address ing and window violation interrupts are not used here See the TMS34010 user s guide if you re serious about learning 34010 programming If you re an experienced 34010 programmer I don t want to hear about bugs in the code or better ways to im plement these ideas Part of my job is to convince my editors I m an authority in this area I don t want any wisepersons messing up that myth And don t give up on this article if you find the start too elementary That will change before the end Everyone regardless of skill background should find something of significance in here Ray Tracing Imagine an eye floating in space If you draw a line from it the first object it meets is the first thing you d see if you looked along that line The idea is so simple
148. e PSP which contains what I call the internal handle of the given file The internal handle is an index into the primary table of DOS file handles stored deep down inside MS DOS The internal table will have from 8 to 255 entries depend ing on the FILES entry in your CON FIG SYS configuration file When a program starts up the first five entries in the PSP handle table are automatically assigned in order to the values found in Figure 5 Any value other than FFh in a hand le indicates that it is open to a file or device As you can see this system gives MS DOS great flexibility in assign ing a program s I O to files and devices Since MS DOS treats a device the same way it treats a file it can do I O redirection the gt lt and com mand line operators merely by chang ing the internal handle in the program s PSP handle table Finally I hope the information above gives you plenty of room for thought and ex perimentation In the next issue I ll ex plain how the MS DOS environment works and how to manipulate the master copy of the environment I ll also keep you updated on new develop ments in C compilers and tools See ya then Figure 5 Automatic Assigments In The PSP Tabie Entry Standard input Handle Name Value Device 01 CON console Standard output 01 CON console Standard error 01 CON console Standard auxiliary 00 AUX serial port
149. e ee 60 EZ_ASM assembly language macros bridging Cand MASM eee eee 60 PTree parse tree management 1 1 1 e ee 60 HELP pop up help system builder 2 1 2 ee ee ee 50 Multi User BBS chat mail menus sysop displays uses Galacticomm modem card 50 Heap Expander dynamic memory manager for expanded memory 50 Make macros all languages built in rules 2 1 1 ee eee 50 Vector to Raster Conversion stroke letters amp Tektronix 4010 codes to bitmaps 50 Coder s Prolog inference engine for use with C programs 5 8282804 45 C Help pop up help for C programmers add your own notes so soso 40 Biggerstaff s System Tools multi tasking window manager kit 2 2 400 es 40 CLIPS rule based expert system generator Version 4 0 2 6 ee eee ee ee ee 35 TELE Kernel or TELE Windows Ken Berry s multi tasking kernel amp window package 30 Clisp Lisp interpreter with extensive internals documentation 4 30 Translate Rules to C YACC like function generator for rule based systems 30 6 Pack of Editors six public domain editors for use study amp hacking 4 30 ICON string and list processing language Version 6 and update 25 LEX lexical analyzer generator 2 1 1 ee ee 25 Bison amp PREP YACC workalike parser generator amp attribute grammar preprocess
150. ectual landmarks of this century Like many other great theories e g Newton s Three Laws Of Motion or Einstein s principle that no material body can travel faster than light it s based on seemingly simple but profound insights At the heart of Shannon s theory is the idea that in all communication processes messages are sent to resolve uncertainty Each message received is one out of a set of possible messages which might have been sent Let s look in detail at the implications of this insight T mathematical theory of com Uncertainty Consider a situation where any of several outcomes have the same pos sibility For example take a horse race with no favorite no dark horse and an equal number of sorry nags each with an identical chance of losing We feel intuitively that the larger the number of possibilities the greater the uncertainty of the outcome That the uncertainty of a tossup race of 32 horses is greater than the uncertainty of a tossup race of only 8 horses Let s examine this general case where the alternative possibilities are all identical in some detail Afterwards we ll explore the modifications we need to extend our analysis to cases where some outcomes are more probable than others 42 MICROCORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 So What s In A Message When we receive a message or a con firmation that one of the possible mes sages has materialized let s say at a mo
151. ed IPI is defined by IPI P P Px Px Py Py Pz Pz In other words the Pathagorean Theorem The dot product can be used to com pute the angle between two vectors The cos of angle between P and Q P e Q IPI IQI As a consequence of this we see that two vectors are perpendicular at right angles when P Q 0 Informally we represent direction by a vector Sometimes mathematics and computers require us to be exact about such things In particular since our direction vector can have any length there are an infinite number of vectors which represent a given direction When forced to choose a particular one we ll choose the vector which has length one We call vectors with length one unit vectors An arbitrary vector can be converted to a unit vector by normalizing P P P Given two vectors P and Q it s sometimes advantageous to break P into two components one perpendicular to Q and one parallel to Q We say the parallel component is the projection of P onto Q The condition of perpendicularity is the same as the dot product being equal to zero Two vec tors are parallel if one is a scalar multi ple of the other Mathematically 1 P Pl P2 where 2 Pl Q 0 P1 is the perpendicular component and 3 P2 c Q for some number c P2 is parallel to Q The number c can be easily calcu lated dot both sides of 1 with Q P Q Pl Q P2 Q 0 c
152. elf 100 times This should give us 2 raised to the power 2 32 2 32 a hundred times i e 232 a whole number Incidentally both of these are pretty close to 17 fol lowed by 37 zeros Coding Blocks From the viewpoint of information theory the implication is if we code the messages selected from 5 alternatives we need 3 characters to code each of them As we saw above we re wasting some of the capacity of these strings But if we try to pool sets of such messages we may be able to cut down the waste An Example Suppose we consider 100 messages with 5 alternatives each The number of alternative patterns we have is 5 5 5 or 5 raised to the power 100 However since 5 raised to the power 100 is the same as 2 raised to the power 232 it means we should be able to code a block of 100 messages using just 232 characters and not 300 characters as we must if we coded them individually We could economize some by using smaller blocks Suppose we have 3 such messages The number of alternatives is 5 5 5 or 125 If we code them in dividually we have to use 3 characters for each or 9 for the whole set But if we take the 3 messages as one then we need only 7 characters 0 s or 1 s to handle 128 alternatives So 7 characters would be sufficient to represent the 125 alternative patterns MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 43 we re concerned with And the block of 3 messages needs only 7 characters or
153. emantics of L in the notation used first by Smullyan and later adopted for the programming language Prolog It goes like this You can read a clause A lt B C D as in order to establish the relation A es tablish the relations B C and D Prolog programmers should have no trouble un derstanding the definition of Eval Although you can visualize the defini tion as a Prolog program you really need know nothing about Prolog s computa Figure 1 The Syntax of the Language L in BNF Variable Number Expr Oper Expr Expr met orersi lt is Empty Stat Stats Variable Expr if Expr then Stats end if Expr then Stats else Stats end while Expr do Stats end END OF LISTING Figure 2 A Program to Compute the Function Exp y 1 while n gt 0 do nl n 2 if 2 n1 lt n then y y x end n ni x end x x END OF LISTING tion method called SLD resolution In short we instantiate a rule by replacing all of its variables by constants before using it in the process of establishing relationships The Eval s bi bo relation holds iff if Figure 3 A Trace of Program Exp Execution whiles executed END OF LISTING Figure 4 Eval Definition Val N b v lt Number N v Val V b v lt Select b V v Val E1l E2 b vl v2 lt Val E1 b vl Val E2 b v2 Val E1 E2 b vi v2 lt Val
154. ence will be held on Friday and Saturday at Central Oregon Community College but we ll get things started Thursday with river rafting and a barbeque Let us know your plans so we can throw another burger on the barbie REGISTRATION Ai out and return the attached registration form indicating which activities you wish to attend Enclose your full payment with the form All technical sessions on Friday and Saturday are free but to help defer the cost of the conference we are asking for dona tions in any amount Check in at the Pinckney Center Thursday afternoon or Friday morning to receive your SOG packet The SOG packet will include your tickets to the barbeque Saturday night banquet tick ets and a speaker schedule If you re going rafting check in at the Pinckney Center at the times mentioned under rafting People with display tables can set up their equipment in the Pinckney Center Thursday The dorms at Central Oregon Community College will be dosed for remodeling this year We ll send out lodging pamphlets with the SOG information packets Travel arrangements can be made through Cascades Travel 503 382 3772 up the food Prices for the barbeque are 10 for adults and 6 for children under 12 Thursday Night Barbeque is included in the price of all raft trips FRIDAY amp SATURDAY These two days will be filled with lectures discussions workshops and forums We ll be discussing new C Compilers C a new AI language an
155. er done And the hottest thing in the issue was Gary Mellor s Turbo C debugger Thanks Gary More Of Last Issue What s the page number for the culture corner Culture Corner Last issue was a killer missing columns two a shortage of graphics confusing page layouts incorrect page numbers Can we skip to issue 41 Nope Somebody d notice If you ve been following the continuing saga of Micro C and Desktop Publishing you might expect me to take a poke at Ventura I can t It worked better than ever Our output was almost untouched from laser typesetter to printer Our turnaround was faster than ever In two weeks we d Ventura d the articles laid out the magazine typeset the pages pasted everything together and shipped it off to Michigan for printing Michigan Hey Marge Micro C s being printed in Michigan The problem was human Very human Two weeks aren t enough when you re as imprecise scatterbrained and pushed as I am at deadline time I m an idea person You want an idea Here You want something edited Great You want the table of contents to point to the right page We re talking infinite precision Find someone else Fortunately I m surrounded by people who cope pretty well with deadlines They flagged most of the errors before those errors saw the dark of ink but Culture Corner and CP M Notes were misplaced Oh we ve found them but they didn t make issue 40
156. er which Is completely self contained which gives you up to 20 hours active computing from just 4 AA batteries yet which talks and listens to your IBM Acomputer witha full size keyboard Ina package less than the size of an 84x11 with a total weight of less than 2Ibs The Z88 A computer without compromise Z 88 Computer aiseee 479 00 SERIAL to PARALLEL I F 45 95 PC to 2 88 Linkup 45 00 1 2 MEG RAM 0 eee 359 95 32K RAM 4 cansdiccesvewnncaspcaatnncene 39 95 DATABASE S W 00020eee eer 419 95 32K EPROM seis ceaceversineeat on wiens 39 95 CARRYING CASE 060005 19 95 128K RAM 1 0 cee cece ec ee eee eee 89 95 2 88 MAGAZINE 00200065 5 00 128K EPROM s eee ee eee 83 95 X MODEM S W eee 89 95 RS 232 LEAD ooon 19 95 5 SHIPPING ON Z 88 VISA MC Accepted with 3 surcharge C O D charge is 2 25 If there are any questions feel free to call or write a SHARP S INC eam Mechanicsville VA 23111 Add 5 for shipping and handling SHAREWARE DISK AVA BLE FOR 10 00 804 746 1664 3 surcharge on credit cards Set ow 5s Reader Service Number 87 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 71 19 95 Real Time Clock My Kaypro 2 84 is equipped with Micro C s Pro 884 Max ROM Recently I had the lid off performing the drive step rate mod and noticed several empty sockets and missing components Checking the schematic it ap
157. ers or laptops that use 3 5 diskettes and the rest of the MS DOS world still using 5 drives The cable supplied will allow you to transfer files and software between the two computers FAST Simple to use and reliable Get it now for only 99 00 Asher ASHER TECHNOLOGY PUTS FAX ON YOUR DESKTOP OR YOU CAN TAKE IT WITH YOU ON YOUR LAPTOP FOR LESS THAN 500 We have found the answer to every small business s need for FAX at a price they can afford and that works Get in on this exciting new technology Call for free demo disk RON ANGERT S iL on OR RO wae SOLUTIONS P O Box 166 Riner VA 24149 1 800 323 4829 703 382 6624 call 24 hours 7 days a week Visa MasterCard C O D We Ship Worldwide Dealers Supported Reader Service Number 24 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 45 end is 0 since the receiver knows that what is received is what was sent Shan non called the residual entropy the Equivocation in the message So the noisy channel instead of resolving the uncertainty of 1 has only resolved 1 0 72 0 28 This figure is said to be the Capacity of the channel of transmission Reducing Errors To Zero On the face of it it looks as if there may not be any recourse for remedying this uncertainty How can the receiver know whether the 1 or 0 received was sent as such or was received after distor tion The remarkable and powerful result which Shannon proved is this it should be possible to
158. esentation of a hypothesis about an input domain The hypothesis could be anything but in its simplest form you might think in terms of a two state digital input output sys tem 1s and 0s Neurons firing or not The strength or weight of the connec tion between any pair of units could rep resent the correlation between the two hypotheses For example if two neurons are con nected can influence each other we give them a value of 1 If they aren t con nected we give them a value of 0 Obviously our brains are a bit more complicated than this but even at this level things can heat up fast Fifteen neurons would require over 100 connec tions Fifty meurons well over a thousand connections And our brain has billions of neurons Even a Cray wouldn t have a chance in a brain size network So naturally enough researchers imagine small artificial net By Diane Ingraham Gurmail Kandola and Mark Pillon School Of Engineering Science Simon Fraser University working systems based on the simplest form of a brain s neural network In these artificial networks or simula tions knowledge is stored in a pattern of connections and weights which the net work uses for learning processing and generalizing from problems The nodes in an artificial neural network represent processing elements and each can accept multiple inputs The operation of the nodes is determined by differential equations transfer
159. ess in ES BX of a word containing the segment of the first MCB I m not sure what this function actually points to but it works for find CIRCUIT BOARDS PCB Edit creates multi layered PCB s with ease Included are solder mask and legend ink support plotter and printer drivers and one of the fastest CAD artwork layout packages for the IBM Only 99 95 Demo Disk 40 00 PCB Shop will build your double sided plated thru holes circuit boards from PCB Edit files or your artwork for only 1 00 per square inch in single quantity No set up charges for PCB Edit files 25 00 set up charge for other artwork ANALOGIC the 32 channel logic analyzer for the IBM PC XT has a 16 bit trigger word 80 nano second sample time and costs only ASSEMBLED BARE BOARD 399 95 99 95 Call or write for more information ANALOGIC Phone 602 458 4065 P O Box 3228 Sierra Vista Arizona 85636 Reader Service Number 38 50 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 egment of the owning Program s Program Segment Prefix PSP ee Biok Size Ga 16 byte Paragraphs 00h 2 Figure 3 The PSP Format a Lo eo ogee Byte o ee Offset poengen Purpose coe the 8088 instruction INT 20h A program can jump to this instruction to exit Calling function 4Ch of INT 21h is considered to the proper way of exiting though Segment address of the ESP of cee menceye Unknown Reserved
160. f they d just explain the details of the interface so we could roll our own Point also lets you assign any com mand to any key or and here s the neat part to any combination of mouse buttons or mouse buttons combined with directional movement of the mouse For example you can assign right button combined with a flick left to mean DELETE TO SCRAP while right button with right motion is COPY FROM SCRAP Wild idea Oh yeah and you can also define your own menus of editor commands that will either pop up wherever you are on the screen or pull down from the top bar Still just a candidate though I m very opinionated when it comes to text editors But I really like the concepts behind Point I m even going so far as to use it to write this column It s great being able to pop up the code that I m writing about while I m writing about it And without squeezing the window this text is in down to nothing l Il be playing around more hopeful ly discovering how to make it go to a full 66 lines or even more with a smaller font More later Down To Business How about some substance in this silly column you ask Okay I m easy at least that s what rumor says Let s talk about programming In particular let s talk about INT 16h the keyboard software interrupt 56 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 I guess before we rip it apart a short definition of what it does and how it
161. first neural net pattern associator is an interesting model but it is not of much use unless you know all the ele ments of the input and output patterns What happens if some of the elements are missing That is if you have an input pattern say made up of three elements 101 for example Then the model is help less if you input only 10_ or _01 or 1_1 One of the beauties of our own brains is that we can make inferences about missing information The Boltzmann Machine is a version of neural net model which can recognize patterns even though the data is faulty or incomplete It can guess what the missing elements are In fact it can even be trained using incomplete data Similar to human train ing Background Some background first In 1982 John Hopfield proved that a network of sym metrically interconnected units would operate by the same mathematical rules as a ball rolling around on a bumpy sur face The network tends to settle into one of many stable energy states where the potential energy function has a local min imum in much the same way as the ball would settle into a dimple on the surface refusing to move until someone or some thing gives it a poke This network is essentially a model of associative memory where each local minimum in the energy function cor responds to an association being stored in the network A Boltzmann Machine is nothing more than one of these Hopfield net works that uses a spe
162. fully assembled and ports are all standard on board With Award 3 01 bios 640k 200W tested one year parts and labor warranty power supply Samsung amber monitor with Hercules compatible controller locking case AT style keyboard 1 2MB drive 20MB XT Turbo Superturbo Seagate Assembled amp fully tested with a full one year warranty 599 4 77 8MHz 4 77 10MHz Get in on the most advanced AT compatible on the market at the lowest price ever offered 3 99 comp lete Comp lete McTek Systems Inc 1411 San Pablo Avenue Berkeley CA 94702 414 843 0714 DI sor DISK DRIVES PRINTERS MONITORS PC XT PC AT MISC Fujitsu 360k 0005 75 Citizen CD 120 159 Samsung amber 79 640k TurboMothrbrd McTek286 6 8 10 12MHV 289 Kingtech Portable Computer Fujitsu 1 2MB 6 99 Citizen CD 180 189 TVM EGA color 399 10MHz TurboMothrbrd pe Baby McTek 286B AT Kits XT AT power supply TOAC occ ccccscecsccccees 79 HPLASAR Serial2 1799 TVM RGB color 289 Multi I O w disk contrir 59 10 13 O wait 409 case keyboard monitor Teac 1 2MB 105 Epson LX 800 219 NEC Multisync 559 640k RAM card 39 McTek 286A O wait 3MB ee cette eect eee 380 410 Toshiba 3 720k 119 Toshiba 321 XL 559 Sony Multiscan 650 2MB Expansion card 115 4 ports on board 449 Eprom Bummer 4 socket 139 Floppy controller
163. functions which specify the change in output with time based on the input signals The coefficients of these transfer functions can be modified following a learning rule Although neural net models found in the literature differ in the details of their structures applications and training pro cedures they all share the following e A set of processing units or neurons e An activation state aj on or off high or low of the system at time t determined by the states of all processing units e An output rule to determine out put Oi of a unit e A pattern of connectivity among all units showing both the connec tion and its associated weight Wij e An activation rule to find the new activation level for a neuron based on its current state and the input it receives Netij e A learning rule for modifying weights e An operating environment Each neuron or processing unit can also be labelled according to the role it plays e Visible units those that interface with the environment e Hidden units those that are un known to the environment How Do They Learn Just like small children neural nets Burnaby British Columbia Canada V5A 156 must learn by being taught We can group the learning into two classes as sociative learning and regularity dis covery 1 Associative Learning in which the states of all visible units in a system are represented by a list of components a pattern
164. garth Lane Collegeville PA 19426 215 584 4261 PRICE 139 00 first copy 100 each additional MC VISA COD PA residents add 6 sales tax Outside USA add 15 Runs on MS DOS works with any C compiler direct support for 12 major C compilers including Microsoft 5 0 Turbo C86 Lattice Datalight Desmet PC lint is a trademark of Gimpel Software MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 15 Neural Networks Learning Systems Based On The Brain During the edit I found myself talking with Diane Ingraham one of the authors And during that discussion talk turned to the usefulness of the neural models We re using the model to help our robot see I see For instance the robot views a whole desktop We put an egg on the desk then replace the egg with a walnut We tell the robot what s unique about each scene Then we put the robot into a whole new environment put one of the objects somewhere in the new scene then ask it whether the new scene is more likely to con tain the egg or the walnut That s exciting It s not that I m espe cially into eggs or walnuts but think about the possibilities for teaching machines to recognize objects despite the fact that the objects may lie in new surroundings or may make up only a tiny part of a scene This is front edge stuff folks Now where s that egg illustration Egg I think this computer s got its neurons on backwards ach of us has a
165. ges and then There s a lot more to three dimensions than gluing a updates us on memory model sizes balsa wood model to the face of your CRT Earl tackles the nits and grits mathematics and chip manipulation required to give depth to your flat screen 54 86 World Laine returns to the U S and celebrates by building a Diane Ingraham Gurmail Kandola Mark Pillon keyboard translator Neural Networks Making computers think the way you think isn t as easy 58 ShareWare as you might think 62 On Your Own Paul Voda The Logic Of 66 Pascal Column Programming Languages _ If you can prove mathematically that a language works and 71 Culture Corner prove that the program is valid then you ve proven the results Unfortunately many languages are unprovable 85 Technical Tips Bruce Eckel The Mysteries Of RS 232 If you need connections in the computer world let Bruce CPMCORNER s sdg Cc YAN CORNER put in a plug for you so all your handshakes will be IM CO E successful 72 CP M Notes Larry Fogg Intel s 8088 Larry exposes PC brains in this 73 Kaypro Column his last look at the monster chips in the MS DOS machines vy Ramachandran Bharath How Much Information Does A Message Contain Know anything about information theory It s that stuffy theoretical stuff they teach in graduate school Right Well it s not so stuffy and it s not just for students anymore Cover illustration by Paul Leatherwood
166. ght do it someday but I m too busy with real things right now Wait a Minute I don t even believe in benchmarks Why am I bothering with all this Gary s note Thanks Laine I m still confused about why we re getting this variation oops I used that statistical word in our benchmark but I assure you all our benchmark feedback has been from readers testing on their machines Maybe when you re finished doing real things you can give this one a little more thought and get back to us 80 What 86 And what was that I said about a 10 Mhz 12 Mhz actually 286 with up to 4 Megs of 0 wait state RAM all normal AT type CPU support a clock keyboard port all on a single Compaq 386 like extended AT card Sorry That s a secret Macho Video I always liked the idea of a graphics based multi windowing workstation The idea I said The realization was way beyond my means Graphics made any machine I could afford too slow to bear and there just wasn t enough room on the screen to show any more than a single window without feeling claustrophobic Well the price of macho video is still higher than the cost of my old Big Board but then I m not a student anymore either although I do still dress live and act like one My main system at the office in bustling downtown Lake City as well as con taining the 286 board sshh has a PC Tech 34010 Mono Graphics Board hooked up to a CPT full
167. grams MODULARITY Trilogy is modular language very similar to Modula 2 ENVIRONMENT A complete programming envi ronment you get editor library linker loader error handling automatic make and contextual help Plus you get modules for i string handling file manipu lation windows rales roa Rn eee s So A eR OT aie RE si al alate A TRUE COMPILER Trilogy is an interactive compiler which produces native code for the 8086 8087 LOGICAL PURITY Trilogy was designed from scratch as a simple language with a completely logical foundation Trilogy s speed results from its design not from added commands Prolog s assert cut var and retract are not logical parts of that language They were added to improve performance DATABASE SUPPORT Trilogy supports varia ble size records records with arbitrary values lists re cursive trees plus record insertion deletion and modif ication Anywhere in the file Files are relations and can be queried from within the language PRICE Only 99 95 postpaid U S funds Plus 5 00 shipping amp handling Or 12 00 shipping amp handling outside North America Check money order or VISA accepted 741 Blueridge Ave North Vancouver BC Canada V7R 2J5 604 986 3234 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 25 Get greater than or equal Get all keys and locations svi A HSIN aited ag ik met bar procedure Expl x integer n integer
168. he people you call if they have the time to answer your questions or if it would be more convenient to call at another time They will appreciate your thoughtfulness and may very well give you more informa tion than you would have gained other wise Above all be Professional Record the conversations If you find the practice distasteful take notes MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 63 during and immediately after the con versation Don t assume that you will remember the details two days later It s also a good idea to follow up with a letter of thanks You may well be contacting these people again as you start marketing your product You want them to remember you as a profes sional Context Questions When you talk to these folk you want to ask context not content ques tions You will find context questions to be harder to answer but more informa tive An example of this line of ques tioning How important is local sup port for the product The content equivalent How many companies offer local support What you are trying to do with the interviews is fill in the fuzzy areas For instance the annual comparison of sales and marketing software mentioned ear lier can give you all kinds of factual data but it probably wouldn t reveal a controversy among users over the value of certain features or the value of using a computer at all I can t overemphasize the impor Software Develo
169. he register when the new one came in destroying the old one the overrun flag is set If parity is on and parity isn t right indicating a noise glitch on the line the 8250 sets the parity error flag If you ve set up the system for inter rupts this is performed in software by your communications program a received byte forces an interrupt Then the interrupt service routine must grab the byte before it s overrun Lotsa Wires There are only three really important wires in serial communication a line to transmit from you to the other guy a line to receive information back and a ground line You can transmit and receive at the same time the lines are completely independent You may notice there are usually 25 pins on your serial connector That s more than three To understand why some history is in order History The EIA RS 232C Electronic In dustries Association Recommended Stan dard 232C was developed solely to con nect Data Terminal Equipment DTEs are computers terminals printers and other like machines to Data Communication Equipment DCE i e a modem It con sists of the definition of a set of lines through which this communication takes place and the voltage levels for ones and zeros through these lines The physical connection is most often made through either a DB 25 traditional or DB 9 connector on some PC adap ters Check out the pinout and line names in Figure 2 On RS 232A tran
170. ight con structs To illustrate the procedural part of Trilogy let s consider the predicate Exp see Figure 5 Exp1 computes the exponential func tion by the logarithmic method The ar guments x n and a are declared as input integer arguments n is restricted to the non negative interval When we call the predicate Exp1 the input arguments will have the ap propriate values The value of the integer output argument y will be computed by the call Note the iff word saying that the predicate Expl x na y holds if and only if the formula in its body holds From the definition of Expl we can easily prove the theorems in Figure 6 By a straightforward induction on n we then obtain Expl x n a y lt gt y x n a Hence the call to Exp1 with the third argument set to 1 computes the exponen tial function for a non negative n Exp1 x n 1 y lt gt y x n There s even a simpler method of in troducing Exp into the Trilogy code given in Figure 7 Both Exp and Exp use the same fast logarithmic exponentiation The predicate Exp requires a true recursion whereas the recursion in Exp1 is a tail recursion Tail recursion is recognized by the Trilogy compiler and is automatically optimized to a loop as in Figure 2 Logic Programming We ve seen that we can introduce Expl as a predicate It s interesting to note that this predicate can be simulated in Pascal by defining a procedure with the
171. ilarly when a 0 is sent 80 of the time it s received correctly but 20 of the time it becomes a 1 Now from the receiver s viewpoint when a 1 is received there is some residual uncertainty Was it a 1 sent which has been received correctly which happens 5 8 or 4 of the time or was it a corrupted 0 which happens 5 2 or 1 of the time In other words when a 1 is received the receiver has 4 to 1 odds or 8 to 2 that it s a correct 1 or a distorted 1 and could compute the entropy of the mes sage as 8 log 1 8 2 log 1 2 0 72 The same would hold if a 0 is received so the average entropy at the receiving end is 0 72 In contrast with no corruption the entropy at the receiving UNINTERRUPTABLE POWER SOURCE MICRO SOLUTIONS protects your equipment and your data from power outages and brownouts Our power systems provide the fastest switching speed in the in dustry 2 ms 1 EMI RFI filtering and surge spike protec tion all in one affordable unit 1 year war ranty on all units Available in a size to suit your needs 200 watts 350 watts 550 watts 800 watts 1000 watts 290 00 360 00 410 00 610 00 710 00 Includes shipping to your door in the con tinental U S As specialists in overseas systems we can supply 220 volt units Call or write for details SOFTWARE SPECIAL BROOKLYN BRIDGE The BROOKLYN BRIDGE supplies the link between the new PS 2 IBM com put
172. in of MCBs using them to discover what is currently in memory After finding the first MCB subsequent ones can be lo cated with the following formula Next MCB segment 16 Current MCB Size 1 If the chain of MCBs is broken MS DOS will eventually crash with a Memory Allocation Error Only the last block of memory in the chain can be deleted safely this is why you re in trouble if you remove a TSR from memory when it s followed by other programs and or TSRs Program Segment Prefix PSP Each MCB has a pointer to the Program Segment Prefix or PSP of the program which owns it The PSP is 256 bytes long and as its name implies it resides in memory as a prefix to the program it is associated with The PSP is rather fascinating containing some very handy and interesting information Figure 3 shows the format of the PSP including several undocumented fields Many programming languages im plement a special reserved variable which points to the segment address of the PSP In most C compilers the vari able is called _psp and is declared in the header file DOS H Turbo Pascal calls it PrefixSeg and it s part of the DOS unit Turbo also has a pair of DOS functions which provide the PSP of the currently executing program Calling the DOS function dispatcher INT 21h with the AH register set to either 62h or 51h will get you the cur rent PSP in the BX register Why there are two identical functions in MS
173. ince no vendor wants to send literature to a competitor Great so now that we have a source for in vestigating our potential market how do we find these magazines Normally the best source for this type of magazine is someone in the in dustry They can not only tell you the names of the magazines that cater to their industry but more important they can often tell you which are highly regarded and which ones are ig nored If you don t know anyone in the industry your next best bet is a university library preferably one that offers a degree in your chosen field University libraries usually subscribe to a large number of trade magazines since many trade magazines send copies to libraries for free If the nearest college is a two day drive from your house you can normally get a list of titles from the Readers Guide at your local library and then get copies via inter library loan Once you have the magazines in hand check them for software ads Xerox any ads offering products similar to yours Also it s not uncommon for trade magazines to have annual comparisons of software For example every Decem ber Sales amp Marketing Management magazine runs a comparison of several hundred sales and marketing applica tions packages Often the comparison done in these magazines is superficial but you can get some very important information from these articles First is an indication of the size of the market
174. interrupt For the keyboard interrupt the 8088 gets a pointer of 9 from the PIC So the 8088 jumps to the address contained in the ninth 4 byte vector If no memory resi dent programs are out there gobbling up keystrokes the jump will be into the ROM BIOS Otherwise some protected area of RAM will contain the interrupt handler In either case the 8088 now processes the keystroke according to the code in the interrupt handler and returns to whatever it was doing before the keystroke Interrupted Interrupts The 8088 won t be able to deal with the keystroke without interruption It has to contend with memory refresh real time clock ticks plus any memory resi dent code that s watching the clock Every 15 microseconds the DMA con troller sees a pulse from counter 1 of the 8253 timer chip on its highest priority DMA request input The DMA controller requests a hold from the 8088 which finishes up with its current task grants the hold and sits back while the DMA controller refreshes part of RAM The other periodic interrupt also originates in the 8253 Counter 0 gooses the PIC s highest priority interrupt re quest line about 18 2 times a second These ticks cause the 8088 to execute the time of day interrupt handler and keep the time updated The End Well that s it We ve looked at all the smarts in the PC There s an amazing amount going on in the 8088 s little head Although we ve gone through a lot
175. ion of the same program given that well qualified programmers are working on each team I take issue however with his ab surd example He makes several state ments about the C language that show he knows as much about C as those who write unmaintainable assembly code do about 8086 assembly language Most glaring is his statement justify ing the construct iopmem strlen iopmem 1 c He says Because of the limitations of the C language it s impossible at compile time to determine the location of the last element of the fixed length array In fact the sizeof operator is a unary operator that according to ANSI section 3 3 3 4 yields the size in bytes of its operand When applied to an operand that has array type the result is the total number of bytes in the array Hence the following code define iop_user sizeof iop_name 1 volatile char iop_name dev iopmem 8alx0 main iop_name iop_user c 6 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 Letters yields the following assembly code when compiled with Microsoft C Vers 5 0 using cl Fa Gs test c misc constant declarations _DATA SEGMENT _iop_name DB dev iopmem 8a1x0 00H _DATA ENDS _TEST SEGMENT pre 5 0 MASM setup stuff PUBLIC main _main PROC NEAR mov BYTE PTR iop name 19 99 ret _ main ENDP _TEST ENDS This is equivalent to Mr Isaacson s one line of assembly language To w
176. is a lie Sys tem configuration switches can be set to disable both parity and I O error mes sages Or you can totally disable NMIs by resetting bit 7 of the NMI mask register port 0A0h to zero Nonmask able interrupt mask sounds government inspired like the Department of Redun dancy Department To reset the 8088 the RESET pin must be held high for at least four clock cycles After four clocks a falling RESET signal triggers the reset sequence During the space of about seven clock cycles the 8088 zeros the DS ES SS and IP registers and sets the CS register to Offffh With reset accomplished the 8088 comes back to life and begins executing code at address OffffOh In the PC this location lies at the end of the ROM BIOS It holds a jump to RESET the routine which does power on self test and we re back in action we hope Finally the 8088 needs a heartbeat and some power The heartbeat comes in the form of an asymmetric square wave from the 8284 clock generator The two thirds low one third high nature of CLK optimizes the 8088 s internal timing And the power is a healthy 2 5 Watts of 5 Volts DC at 0 5 Amps Minimum Maximum Modes This discussion has dealt only with the 8088 in a maximum configuration The MN Mx input alters the functions of nine processor pins and provides two modes of operation for the 8088 Maximum means a large complex configuration where the 8088 needs help with system control It a
177. is fetched Ideally there will always be some thing waiting in the queue for the EU to digest No such luck Two factors decrease the efficiency of the queue A few fast instructions in a row can empty the queue but this doesn t happen all that often The more common queue problem oc curs when a program calls for any kind of branch The branch could be a proce dure call a return from a procedure a loop instruction an interrupt an inter tao Ce rupt return or any of the jump instruc tions In each of these situations sequential prefetch breaks down The next instruc tion in memory is not the next instruction to be executed So the queue gets dumped the BIU begins to refill it start ing at the jump destination and we ve lost some of the queue s benefit You can see that code which jumps around a lot will be slower than sequential code The queue and its maintenance il lustrate one of the differences between the 8088 and 8086 processors The 8088 contains a 4 byte queue which the BIU tries to refill as soon as a single byte has been fetched by the EU Since the 8088 has an 8 bit data path it prefetches one byte at a time The 8086 on the other hand has a 6 byte queue And since it does 16 bit data I O and can therefore prefetch two bytes at a time the 8086 waits until two bytes of the queue have been fetched by the EU before attempting to prefetch another two bytes from memory I O The BIU also hand
178. it s embarrass ing But it s important enough to stimu late many interesting computer pictures In our computer implementation the eye will be a point and the computer screen a rectangle in space The com puter universe will consist of a group of simple mathematical objects spheres planes and rectangles After you ve learned the ropes you can add other kinds of objects to the program if you know the mathematical equation describing the object So let s get to it We can represent an arbitrarily com plex object as a collection of polygons and assign each object a color Pick a pixel or dot on the screen and draw a line from the eye to that pixel This type of line defined by a starting point and a direction is a ray Extend the ray through the screen into space Determine the first object that the ray intersects see Figure 1 As sign the pixel the same color as that ob ject Do this for every pixel on the screen The resulting image will show one view of the imaginary computer universe To create different views of the By Earl Hinrichs PC Tech P O Box 128 Lake City MN 55041 the obvious choice for this project but I prefer 32 bit signed fixed point Fixed point arithmetic is much faster than floating point with the same number of bits Accuracy in either case depends on the number of bits Fixed point won t however let us work on just any scale floating point will so the fixed point im
179. it complete with full source code and 150 page manual now Only 49 95 State Turbo C or Quick C version PROSCREEN Generate high quality data entry screens with the Pro Screen Screen Designer and Code Generator You can draw the data entry screen define the input fields define the input criteria set sereen colors and attributes draw single or double lines make boxes press a few buttons and hey presto Pro Screen generates the C source code for your application Professional applications programmers will find this versatile utility and it s associated functions invaluable Comes complete with a substantial 78 page manual and demo programs Only 49 95 State Turbo C or QuickC version YN Rush me these items M HOTKEY CIO _ PRO SCREEN aN WINDOWS __ M GAMES __ M SUPERTEXT CVIDEO FREE SHIPPING VISA MC COD CHECK essescocooeseecoosococsoosoceceoasosassssocesosesecesecsocscooneescacesseasessasossesene Preteen reo ey neat Lat II BEEE Exp Date Orders amp Enquiries Tel 617 646 6703 ORDER HOTLIN ervi ssesessoasoceecocescceceesone 800 848 8408 WINDOWS Add super fast text screen handling to your applications with the WINDOWS library from Zortech Inc Give your applications the professional look with instant zooming and exploding windows Incorporate drop down menus and Lotus style menus with our easy fo use fun
180. iting Drive C We were able to read endlessly from the drives without errors but read write operations produced read 31 9 42 5 44 5 80 2 10 70 10 70 3 70 one must choose to dynamically for mat the drive specify parameters at the keyboard This is not an option with the early BIOS ROMs for this controller or with the BIOS on the WX1s shipped with Kaypro PCs Either the Auto Con fig BIOS 62 000043 xxx or the Super BIOS 62 000094 xxx must be present in socket U12 for this to be possible For dynamic formatting leave all jumpers at jumper block S1 OFF Run the formatter from DEBUG by entering G C800 5 at DEBUG s prompt The formatter will ask for the drive ID C D desired interleave 7 recom mended for XT class machines and whether you wish to dynamically configure the drive Yes You will then be prompted for number of heads and cylinders etc The last number to specify is the CCB Option Byte otherwise known as the step rate The default value is 5 which sets the rate as 70 5 usec Use 6 instead for the ST4026 which cor responds to 28 5 usec This is probably a good value for the other members of the ST4000 series too although one source Konan controller manual indicates that these drives should be dealt a step rate of a mere 10 5 usec option 7 This makes sense given the range for those drives The numbers are entered all on one li
181. ives sub stantial power savings over the 8088 The V20 uses 0 5 Watts to the 8088 s 2 5 The V20 also enters a low power standby mode whenever it sees a halt instruction Tying It All Together Over the past year we ve talked about the PC s five smart chips one at a time But the PC is a system So let s try to make some sense of the interrelationships which make the PC function We ll keep it simple and just watch how a keystroke ends up as a character on the screen Assuming an idling state with the cur sor hanging out next to the DOS prompt a keypress leads to the following events First the scan code generated by the keypress gets loaded into port A of the programmable peripheral interface PPI and an interrupt request 1 goes out to the interrupt controller PIC If there aren t any higher priority in terrupts waiting to be serviced the PIC raises the 8088 s INT pin requesting in terrupt service for the keystroke If the 8088 s interrupt flag is set enabling inter rupts it finishes its current task and pulls all of its status lines low This causes the 8288 bus controller to generate an interrupt acknowledge for the PIC When the PIC sees that it has the processor s attention it loads an 8 bit pointer onto the data bus The 8088 reads this pointer and uses it to index into a table of 256 4 byte vectors in the bottom of the PC s address space These vectors point to the interrupt handler code for each
182. key The rewrite of ShiftStatFunction will only show ALT as being pressed if CTRL is also pressed The modification to ShiftStatFunction was necessary because Microsoft WORD was overriding the character code if it saw that the alt key was pressed It would see ALT down and ig nore the character value in AL using the extended code in AH instead I also check in KeyXlate and only do a translation if my newly modified ShiftStat shows ALT as not down In other words holding down CTRL dis ables the translation and gives you the original keystroke instead If I want to I can now redefine all of the ALT lt let ter gt combinations without losing the original keys And they always told you that you couldn t have your pizza and eat it too Usage Now don t get all excited and think that you re going to write a popup program that looks to INT 16h for the hotkey I ve seen programs that do that but they end up with a warmkey not a hotkey INT 16h is only activated when the current application asks for input so sometimes nothing happens for quite some time several milliseconds at least A hotkey should hook up to INT 9 that way it will be informed the in stant a key is struck In general use INT 16h if your purpose is to translate keystrokes into other keystrokes If you want to activate another program upon a particular keypress watch INT 9 Extensions A simple way to extend the functionality of TURKKEYS
183. l 800 538 8157 x 811 800 672 3470 x 811 outside Calif inside Calif V COMMUNICATIONS 3031 Tisch Way Suite 200 Dept MC San Jose CA 95128 408 296 4224 PS 2 AT XT and PC are trademarks of IBM Corp 99 95 Reader Service Number 62 it should generate the right output pat tern 2 Regularity Discovery where a machine learns regularities in the input output patterns By building an in ternal model of the environment the net work is able to recognize underlying structures Models Now that we ve described neural net works generally we ll move into the details of two simple neural net models that can be programmed on personal computers The first is a pattern associator which can be trained to associate input patterns with output patterns The second is a Boltzmann Machine Pattern Associator The neural network in Figure 2 has an input layer a hidden layer and an out put layer Each input neuron is con nected to every hidden neuron and to every output neuron Each hidden neuron is connected to every output neuron In this version of the neural net During the first phase we supply an input pattern for example 110 to the input units causing some output pattern to appear at the output units Unless your neural net is a genius the output likely won t be the target pattern you want So in the second phase we calculate the difference between the target pattern and the output Using
184. l amounts of data Some compilers offer mixed model programming This lets you declare pointers far and near or far and wide Now that you hopefully under stand the concept of memory models and pointers let s begin dissecting the special and largely undocumented ways MS DOS uses the PC s memory Memory Control Blocks One function of an operating system is to regulate the use of memory MS DOS must organize space for its own code device drivers TSRs normal MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 49 programs and data The Memory Con trol Block or MCB is DOS s primary tool for memory management An MCB takes up 16 bytes one paragraph of which only the first five bytes are sig nificant These five bytes have the for mat shown in Figure 2 Note I use a trailing h to designate hexadecimal values The Block Size specified in the memory control block tells how many paragraphs of memory are in the block controlled by the MCB An MCB s block of memory follows immediately The MCBs are organized as a con tiguous chain If the chain byte is an M it s a member of the chain other wise it s the last block in the chain MS DOS function 48h allocates a new memory block function 49h deletes a block and function 4Ah attempts to change the size of a block Undocumented function 52h will return a segment in the ES register and an offset in BX subtracting 2 from BX will give you the addr
185. l printers Get mini monitor functions and auto boot capability e 19 built in disk formats including Xerox and Kaypro Includes custom disk format definition program Banked ROM BIOS for more space in your TPA e Composite video adaptor on X120 board e Runs 48 TPI diskettes on 96 TPI drives e Supports real time clock from Z80 CTC e Works on the Xerox 820 1 and Big Board Both ROM and X120 board are required for operation PLUS2 ROM Set and X120 Board A amp T PLUS2 ROM Set and X120 Bare Board PLUS2 ROM Set only 120 Bare Board only x x Special x x 2 boards for 25 5 for 50 Other kits parts and packages available Parts and accessories for the Xerox 820 Xerox 820 2 CPU Board new Xerox 820 2 Floppy Controller board new Xerox 820 2 CPU board w Floppy Controller Xerox 820 1 CPU board new Xerox 820 complete high profile keyboard Xerox 820 bare high profile keyboard new Xerox 820 51 4 drive cable Xerox internal video cable w brightness control Xerox 820 power supply Power connector specify board or cable Xerox parallel printer interface cable Dual Half Height 514 Disk Drives DSDD in cabinet with standard Xerox cable Complete parts and repair services available EMERALD MICROWARES P O Box 1726 Beaverton OR 97075 Z 503 641 0347 30 day money back guarantee on all products Reader Service Number 10 IBM PC CP M NorthStar Macintosh Apple ll MS DOS and PS 2 Don t let incampa
186. l remains non standard no automatic newline However since you can force a newline with the n escape sequence that should not present a problem PAIR compiles to a 5K COM file Given an 18K text file to examine it ran through it in 19 seconds on an un modified Kaypro II with 2 5 MH clock By comparison I have a low priced commercial C compiler I play around with particularly when floats or struc tures are needed neither of which Small C offers Using it the same program compiled to a 16K COM file and took 50 seconds Even though this particular package is not the most highly touted C com piler ever to come down the pike the figures do serve to show that just be cause Small C is public domain doesn t mean it generates second rate code I ve deliberately omitted a com parison of compilation times where not surprisingly the commercial package which includes a linking loader is sig nificantly faster For an application like MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 75 PAIR which I might call on several times a day however I m more than willing to trade an extra couple minutes of compilation for the additional speed and the smaller code size The Virtues Of Compactness The question of size brings me to that tantalizing suggestion by the author of SAMPLE DOC who says As you grow with C you will learn how to reduce the size of your final programs I know I m not the only one who regrets
187. last names values The double arrow gt gt says that the values of the array are all different Tril ogy derives the solution a D b c F without a single backtrack just by find ing the unknown array n satisfying the constraints The initials problem is of course an artificially simple one A medium size logic problem has typically a search space of about 1 5 million candidates A declarative Prolog program must generate all candidates before finding the ones satisfying the constraints Such a program typically executes for about 90 minutes Turbo Prolog on an XT The same Trilogy program is shorter because the clues can be directly trans lated almost word by word from English What is even more important the Trilogy program will generally execute under two seconds with only about five back tracks Really big problems billions of can didates cannot be even contemplated in Prolog by the generate and test method Trilogy can do them within minutes Prolog As A Procedural Language The implementers of Prolog were quite aware of the exponential blow out of the generate and test method and in troduced a number of new features such as cuts asserts retracts vars etc The features were introduced after im plementers realized that they could cleverly utilize the insides of a Prolog en gine to shortcut the search That they also shortcut the logic didn t matter We now solve the puzzle of i
188. les I O chores for the EU Whenever an instruction calls for either memory access or port I O the EU requests a bus cycle from the BIU A bus cycle usually consists of four clock cycles or T states unless we re talking to a slow device More on this later For now let s just be aware that any time the EU needs to talk to the outside world it does so through the BIU As it turns out the BIU ends up spending some of its time idling This can happen when a coprocessor perhaps an 8089 I O coprocessor or the 8087 math chip takes over the bus or when the EU has to grind through a compli cated instruction It only takes four bus cycles or 16 T states to completely fill the queue as suming no interruptions by the EU for MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 37 I O Why does this make me want to say E I E I O But some of the more complicated instructions take well over 150 T states to execute So the BIU gets a breather and usually ends up with some thing waiting in the queue for the EU The third task of the BIU has to do with Segmented Memory Ooooh he said those nasty words The main complaint most folks have against Intel processors is their use of a segmented memory addressing scheme Using only its 16 bit registers the 8088 could directly address only 64 KBytes of memory We need four more bits for a complete 20 bit address into 1 MByte of RAM The BIU contains a dedicated adder which constructs
189. lishers SlicerControl Computer 48 33 E21 Computer MicroCornucopia 87 88 89 Star K Software Systems 04 09 Ecosoft Inc Micro Methods 10 Emerald Microware 36 Microcomputer Systems V Communications 05 Blaise Computing 93 Erac Company 37 Microprocessors Unlmtd 01 Borland Int l Back Cover 24 microSOLUTIONS WindowDOS Associates 87 Brown Bag Software 61 71 81 Gimpel Software 02 Microsphere Xenosoft 53 11 Halted Specialties 59 National Advancement 15 Cascade Electronics 26 Harger I N T Zortech Inc Inside Back Cover 31 CC Software 03 PCTech Inside Front Cover 71 Complete Logic Systems 22 Integrand 20 PeacockSystems 25 60 Contact Advertiser Directly MICROCORNUCOPIA 40 Mar April 1988 93 WINDOWS SPRITES MULTIPLE SCREENS ARE EASY WITH OMNIVID PC elm ut s IBM PC XT and comp liel ces BLAZING FAST Compatible with any language Offers support for multitasking CGA Monochrome Hercules Compatible mee Available March 1988 ep lt m 69 95 E 606 325 3736 mm FLEXISOFT 3987 Valley View Drive Ashland KY 41101 Reader Service Number 25 SourceTools FULL SOURCE CODE MANAGEMENT m Document revision history Audit trails w Branching and key word insertion m Utilities POWERFUL MAKE FACILITY Available for VAX PDP 11 amp MS DOS To order or for more information call 1 800 874 8501 BA OREGON SOFTWARE 6915 SW Macadam Ave Portland OR 97219
190. ll of its I O in the memory space this is called memory mapped I O The 68000 has special handshake lines for slow memory or peripherals The status pins on the 80X86 or 8088 microprocessor tell the rest of the system whether the next access will be memory or I O High level languages also have some method of specifying I O BASIC uses the IN and OUT commands Turbo Pas cal uses the port array Turbo Prolog uses the portbyte predicate Microsoft C uses 220 WATT POWER SUPPLY AT KEYBOARD AT CASE SET UP DISK ONE YEAR WARRANTY ON SYSTEM 1195 inp and outp Turbo C uses inport outport for EGA UPGRADE FOR ABOVE 75 word I O which allows an I O instruc tion to use the maximum word size of the processor s data bus 8 bits on the 8088 16 bits on the 8086 80286 and 32 bits on the 80386 or inportb outportb0 for byte I O The 8250 chip occupies a block of eight addresses in the I O space Switches on the serial card determine the base starting I O address Well behaved programs find out which I O base address is supposed to be COM1 and which is COM2 by read ing the BIOS data area Base offset 0040 0000 holds COM1 and 0040 0002 holds COM2 This way you can switch the ports without rewiring simply change the data Many programs don t bother reading this data however so it isn t very useful 512K UPGRADE 1024 INSTALLED 130 5339 KEYBOARD UPGRADE 30 HARD DRIVES FOR XT AND AT ST
191. lso needs to be able to handle coprocessors In a minimum configuration the 8088 generates its own bus control signals in stead of using S0 S2 as discussed above These extra control signals take the place of the processor status queue status lock and request grant lines necessary for coprocessor control So a system using the minimum configuration like the PCjr cannot have coprocessors The V20 A few years back NEC came out with an 8088 replacement called the V20 The chip has proved to be very popular for a couple of reasons First it executes the 8080 instruction set Quite exciting for the CP M world at first but interest in this feature seems to have dwindled And for good reason why cripple your clone with foreign software when an abundance of good software exists that takes advantage of the native system A better reason exists for using the V 20 It s fast Fast because of e Use of two data busses in the EU e Faster address generation in the BIU e Two extra 16 bit registers for mul tiplication division and shift ro tate instructions e Special prefetch pointer This pointer shows the location to be accessed next and reduces the loss of time due to jumps in code e New instructions for bit manipulation and BCD opera tions Interesting but not that use ful I doubt that many folks take advantage of these because the software would be incompatible with the 8088 Use of CMOS technology g
192. m Software Tools tweaked a bit by James Hendrix to allow for the possibility of tabs and backspaces in the input A fixed tab size of 8 the standard CP M tab interval is used to simplify the program If you really need to entab a file with other tab sizes just retrieve the value from the command line or prompt for it In either event the obtained value could be converted to an integer value with the function dtoi in LIBASM C and assigned to the vari able tabsize Currently however LIBASM C MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 73 74 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 is not needed and is not appended Avoiding The Singles Scene The best things in life often come in pairs braces and brackets in C programs for instance quotation marks and parentheses in ordinary English text and S and B underline and boldface controls in WordStar files PAIR C is designed to keep your files honest It makes sure that items which should be paired are To do this it reads the file character by character counting braces brackets and so on When it s finished it determines whether the number of left hand characters equal those on the right Or in the case of quotation marks or print controls which don t have a right and left whether the total is evenly divisible by two Editor s note PAIR and COUNT which follows are available in the Issue 41 file on the Micro C RBBS 503 382 7643 and on the Micro
193. m the crowd I began this series on the PC s in nards with a look at the 8253 programmable interval timer This article caps the series by covering the iAPX 88 10 or 8088 to the less snooty among _us Til also talk briefly about some of the differences between the 8088 and other members of the 8086 family of CPUs NEC s V20 included We ll finish up by following a keystroke from keyboard to screen to see how all these smart chips conspire to perform something simple Rr in Micro Cornucopia Issue 35 All In The Family In 1978 Intel introduced the father of the 8086 family named appropriately enough the 8086 The following year saw the first of the soon to be ubiquitous 8088s The two processors were nearly identical the main difference being the size of their data busses The 8086 trans ferred 16 bits of data at a time while the 8088 could deal with only 8 bits However object code compatibility be tween the two processors was complete and IBM s choice of the 8088 for use in their PC assured Intel of a huge market The 8086 and 8088 were followed by the 80186 80188 80286 and most recent ly the 80386 CPU all compatible with the 8086 That means the whole family can execute 8086 code The 186 16 bit data I O and 188 8 bit added on board clock direct memory access DMA interrupt control counter timer chip select logic and more Inside that one piece of silicon lay most of the smart chips I
194. mainframes and it s easy to use You can find it on most BBS s and on Micro C disk 38 Muppet Protocol The only problem with most of these protocols is they were developed on microcomputers so many of them can only be found on microcomputers al though XMODEM is often found on UNIX systems Columbia University set out to smash the communications protocol bug once and for all with KER MIT the name of a famous frog that s all KERMIT is designed to work on all computers without regard to size This was an ambitious project but it seems to work and it helps that all the source code is public domain KERMIT negotiates with the other end to establish the communication parameters This is clever since it allows extensions to the protocol without dis turbing existing installations Two extensions have already been made to speed KERMIT up but it still Rafting assumes computers can only handle printable ASCII characters This is one of Barbeq ue the things which make it portable but it C ompu t er tech tal k runs like a turtle not a frog compared to XMODEM As a rule of thumb use XMODEM whenever you can and KER SOG Vil MIT when you can t July 14 July 16 There s a lot more to writing a com munication program than I can cover Bend Oregon here check out Joe Campbell s superb C ee T indi Programmer s Guide to Serial Communica Leave city life behind tions Howard W Sams amp Company 1987 but I
195. may have heard the expression that vectors have both length and direc tion At first a point appears to have neither length or direction But the point gets a length and direction if we think of it as being defined by the vector from the origin to that point We can add or subtract two vectors by adding or subtracting their coor dinates P Q Px Qx Py Qy Pz Qz Figure 3 Fixed Point Square Root xSqRoot compute square root of a by iterating x a0 sqrt a0 sp a4 a5 a6 jout mtm values btst jrnz root movi 31 a0 f s_00 10 a6 a0 a4 a0 a5 move move rooting fs_01 move move calir add sra sub sra dsjne a5 a0 a4 al fxDivide a0 a4 1 a4 a4 a0 1 ad a6 fs_01 ad a0 sp a4 aS a6 END OF LISTING may change the value of the pointer but the new value will still be a valid pointer These conventions are personal rules only I present them here only as an ex planation of the register usage in this article You should adopt whatever con ventions fit your style of programming and the program you re writing Three Dimensional Geometry The simplest object in geometry is a point An arbitrary point in the three dimensional universe called 3 space for short is specified by three coordinates We write P Px Py Pz where P is the point and Px Py and Pz are respec tively the x y z coordinates of P We have to specify directions in 3 space
196. meters only As a consequence the programs can be relatively easy to prove correct Since the programs don t depend on any hidden assumptions they re easier to maintain and more rugged The great computer scientist Tony Hoare once observed that Algol was an improvement over all programming lan guages succeeding it We can paraphrase him and say that The semantics of logic is a real improve ment over the denotational semantics which came fifty years later The declarative languages used to have quite inefficient implementations The mainstream programmers could thus claim that they are just academic toys and that real programmers use C For tunately declarative languages have come of age although not all C program mers have It s now clear that we can have sound logic and efficiency say at the level of Pascal The programming language C will probably stay with us as a system implementation language but we re con vinced that most applications can be written in declarative style Trilogy is a new declarative program ming language in which we ve combined our theoretical research experience in the area of programming language semantics with the practical experience of compiler writing Trilogy is a language firmly based on predicate calculus Its programs are col lections of predicates relations Trilogy combines the areas of procedural database and logic programming within a simple language of only e
197. mory for its source and sym bol buffers this reduces disk accesses and lets you debug larger programs It supports keyboard macros you can as sign frequent command sequences to a function or control key You can also search the text buffer forwards or back wards to rapidly find a procedure or variable name The assembly mode is fun you can learn a lot about how the compiler operates by using it Since the original source if available is interspersed with the symbolic disassembly you can see exactly what the compiler did for you You can also disassemble to the printer or a disk file This raises the possibility of hand optimization of time critical routines I haven t found any bugs in the beta test copy I ve been evaluating but I haven t really been able to push it to it s limits either At 45 90 with source I think it s an exceptional buy Add Ons The only computer language with all features for all situations is Ada It s large cumbersome and difficult to learn Most languages try to provide a balance between features and size and let the programmer create the routines he she needs for specific problems Turbo Pascal is one of the languages that provides a good balance fast and efficient but with sufficient power built in to make the coding easy The lack of some special features has created a market for useful unique and or difficult to program subroutine libraries If you are programming to le
198. mour PC Magazine January 1988 99 66 The Turbo 101 can satisfy all it s a rock solid product that does double duty and then some Robert Luhn PC World October 1987 99 data INTERNATION 7651 HASKELL AVENUE VAN NUYS CA 91406 818 780 1673 ea me mwan u een wn ay aha aw me aa naana Ten u O S y BOTH lt TURBO 101 ENHANCED KEYBOARD AND THINKTANK SOFTWARE FOR ONLY LIMITED OFFER Name Ciy State Zip IT S WHAT S UNDER THE HOOD THAT COUNTS XT KIT W 2 Floppy Drives Includes K RAM Serial parallel and game ports clock calendar AT Style keyboard cabinet power supply mono graphics card and amber or green monitor Keyboard switchable turbo 8 mhz with lock LED Reset amp Turboswitch 10mhz with lock LED Reset amp Turboswitch 599 00 XT KIT W 20MB Hard Drive Includes K RAM Serial parallel and game ports clock calendar AT Style keyboard cabinet power supply mono graphics card and amber or green monitor Keyboard switchable turbo 8 mhz with lock LED Reset amp Turboswitch 10mhz with lock LED Reset amp Turboswitch For 30MB Miniscribe add 50 00 CASES amp POWER SUPPLY 150 Watt Power Supply XT 50 00 200 Watt Power Supply AT 80 00 XT Slide Case cccceeeee eee 34 00 XT Flip Top or XT Slide with Lock amp LED 38 00 AT with Lock amp LED
199. mpany with annual revenues exceeding two million dollars Button s wife eventually agreed that her husband s idea was not so crazy Biggest And Best Today ButtonWare offers one of the most complete collections of shareware productivity programs covering all of the major PC applications None of the software exceeds 70 for a registered copy For the list see the table which follows Current Roster Of ButtonWare Software PC File 2 0 database 0 0 69 95 PC Type 1 0 word processor 69 95 PC Calc 1 0 spreadsheet 69 95 PC Dial 1 0 communications 59 95 PC Stylist style checker 000 29 95 PC Tickle tickler calendar 29 95 XD Extended DOS shell 29 95 Baker s Dozen misc utilities 59 95 Meanwhile Button has been working toward loose integration of his programs In addition to sharing graphics features PC Calc and PC File understand each other s file for mats sufficiently to share data In par ticular PC Calc can create spread sheets from PC File databases A Selection Of Greatest Hits Stories have been circulating that ButtonWare will move into the in tegrated software market with a program called Medley Medley lives but not in its originally envisioned form Instead of an integrated package Medley has become an integrator for ButtonWare s database word processor and spreadsheet That
200. ms Inc 741 Blueridge Ave N Vancouver B C V7R 2J5 Canada and only if the program s executed under the variable bindings given by bi stops with possibly new variable bindings bo i We use a string representation of programs to emphasize that a program is a sequence of symbols Strings are decomposed with the help of high powered but obvious string pattern matching constructs Alternatively we could have used lists to encode programs in the so called abstract syntax Variable bindings are lists of variables coupled with their current values For example Cx 2 y 1 n 5 Editor s note The symbols and enclose a list The relation Select b var val holds iff the variable var is associated with the value val in the bindings b The relation Newb bi var val bo holds iff the bind ings in bo are like bi but with the value val associated with the variable var This relation obviously captures the effect of the assignment var val The relation Val exp b val holds iff the value of expression exp computed under bindings b is val The meaning of programs in L is given indirectly by the relation Eval Nevertheless this is a perfectly valid ap proach and the programs are amenable to mathematical analysis We can prove facts about the relation Eval For example let s denote by P the while loop of the program in Figure 2 By using induction on the variable n we can easily
201. n easier way I don t know it MCONFIG from the Pro 884 Max utilities disk allows setting and display of the clock Other Micro C disks K46 K49 have such routines for those without the ROM Finally if anyone tries this mod and fries their board I will disavow all knowledge of their actions JDR Microdevices 110 Knowles Dr Los Gatos CA 95030 Billy Guthrie PO Box 8184 Gadsden AL 35902 Editor s note The universal board in the 2 84 Kaypros not only has room for the clock thanks Billy but for the internal modem as well We made an attempt to chase down the parts a while back with somewhat discouraging results If anyone has done the modem mod and has a good source of parts let us know A 1N4148 works fine in place of the 1001 They re both just low power diodes A solder sucker will also clean out the circuit board holes but a toothpick is cheaper A Plea From Indonesia I am an Australian who this year commenced a two year stint on an Australian Foreign Aid program in In donesia Sources of useful information and public domain software are very difficult to find here Mind you software is available for about 30 cents plus the cost of the disk Sickening although here there s nothing illegal about it Having been president of a Kaypro user group in Australia I am always very careful about piracy issues Here anyone concerned about piracy is a laughing stock I would be very keen to hear from anyone
202. n the predicate rcinf When the inferences saturate the matrix we must still check that all initials have been set OVERSTOCK amp DEMOS COMPUTERS ACCESSORIES KAYPRO 2 2X amp 4 150 200 Z 80 CO PROCESSOR BOARDS BABY BLUE TURBO SLAVE 100 USED 3M DC 300 XL TAPE CARTRIDGES 5 00 All plus shipping charges PROJECT DATA SYSTEMS INC 1050 Northgate Dr 200 San Rafael CA 94903 415 492 1840 50 28 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 This almost unreadable program seems to be a terrible overkill for such a simple problem Unfortunately the use We think the hacks shouldn t have happened The designers should have in sisted on the purity of both languages of var and nonvar to simulate constraints is the only feasible way of solving large But perhaps it couldn t have been helped After all Lisp was designed al Figure 10 Extralogical Use of Prolog names AD AE AF BD BE BF CD CE CF lt BF 0 second clue AD 1 AE 1 BD 0 Sthird clue infer AD AE AF BD BE BF CD CE CF draw all inferences novar AD novar AE novar AF novar BD novar BE novar BF novar CD novar CE novar BF see that all is set infer AD AE AF BD BE BF CD CE CF lt reinf AD AE AF A rcinf BD BE BF A rcinf CD CE CF A reinf AD BD CD A xcinf AE BE CE A reinf AF BF CF A A ok A inferred infer AD AE AF BD BE BF CD
203. n the near future explaining these techniques The RAM Price Debacle If you ve been following RAM prices over the last few months you know what s been happening RAMs have been skyrocketing in price at a rate to tally unanticipated Here s a brief chronology with some whys and wherefores Keep in mind that I m quot ing volume pricing Early 1987 April The price of 256K DRAMs in large quantities is about 1 60 1 Meg DRAMs go for about 18 A reliable supplier of mine tells me that 1 Meg DRAMs will be less than 10 by the end of the year American DRAM _ manufacturers chiefly TI and Micron Technology have been complaining to their congressmen about alleged DRAM dumping by Japanese manufacturers Dumping is either described as selling below the cost of production of a product or sell ing at a price below the price in the home market Congressmen yelled at the Japanese government which yelled at Japanese DRAM manufacturers to stop it Japanese manufacturers voluntarily limited their production which gradually raised the price of 256K DRAMs to over 2 Korean manufac turers primarily Samsung although not bound by any agreement raised their price to follow the market Mid 1987 The rise in the value of the yen against the dollar continued to put pressure on the semiconductor market Still 256K DRAM prices were holding fairly steady at about 2 25 4th Quarter 1987 Samsung the main
204. native A which we know is log 5 4 which from the properties of logarithms is the same as log 5 log 4 From the viewpoint of uncertainty this tells us that the uncertainty has been reduced from a situation of 5 equally possible alternatives to one of 4 equally possible alternatives and so is not much of a reduction in uncertainty Since A has a probability of 4 5 and B has a probability of 1 5 we can think of the selection as being from a bag in which there are four pieces of paper marked A and one marked B So when A materializes it only means that one of the four A s has been picked But even though we are technically uncertain which of the four A s was picked it doesn t really matter For our purposes the four A s are equivalent So this residual uncertainty of log 4 isn t important although it explains why the formal reduction in uncertainty comes out as a low figure when something has a high probability like 4 5 More interesting is the conclusion we have come to that the average uncertain ty is 0 722 s_bits In terms of our previous interpretation this means we should on the average need a string of 0 s and 1 s whose length is less than 1 character But with two alternatives how do we use an average length of less than 1 character when at least 1 character is needed to represent 2 alternatives Again the answer lies in coding blocks of messages
205. nce functions output formatting scoping structures bit arrays transcendental functions e UnCommon Features graphics low level DOS access customization e Sample AI application programs e Fully indexed 150 page reference manual e Unlimited free technical support Free shipping on prepatd orders Microcomputer Systems M SC Consultants P O Box 747 Santa Barbara CA 93102 805 963 3412 Reader Service Number 36 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 79 SCIENTIFIC GRAPHICS Presentation Quality Graphics For Printers and Plotters Screen Graphs for Fast Previews Curve Smoothing Interpolations Stgre te Mies Mtie ta a Legends Placed Anywhere Built In Editor Auto Manual Scaling Log Lin SemiLog An Indespensible Tool For Technical Professionals Special Introductory 79 Price System Requirements IBM PC XT AT or Compatible running DOS 2 0 or higher Sereen graphs require graphics card Printer Graphs require Epson EX FX JX RX HS Star Gemini Radix SD SG SR IBM Graphics or compatibility with one of the above Plotter graphs require HP GL compatibility P O Box 956 Dept M Valley Forge PA 19482 For Technical Information 215 269 0198 Reader Service Number 60 Reader Service Number 59 80 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 automatic copy units this would definitely do the trick How Fast On my system for instance diskcopy takes about 60 seconds to copy to an unformat
206. nchmark results is available on the Micro Cornucopia BBS at 503 382 7643 For example it now contains figures for Datalight Optimum C v3 14 Turbo C 1 5 Mark Williams Let s C v4 0 12 and MIX Power C v1 0 0 Let s start with an update on the compilers reviewed last issue OOPS Somehow a line got dropped somewhere in my comments about Quick C in issue 40 Quick C DOES use standard libraries LIB files The integrated version uses just the standard Quick Libraries unless told otherwise in a Program List used to build a MAKE con trol file The Quick Library provided excludes such things as math and graphics functions To add functions not present in the default Quick Library you must either create a new Quick Library or include the Medium model library MLIBCE LIB in a Program List Microsoft Update Early versions of Quick C would cause a hard disk crash when used with a specific type of old Western Digital controller This was a bug in the controller not in Quick C You can either upgrade your controller ROM by con tacting Western Digital or get a modified ver sion of Quick C from Microsoft call 800 426 9400 i Microsoft s Optimizing C which I ab breviate as MSC version 5 00 will not compile some programs containing complex switch 48 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 statements embedded in loops The compile will fail with an out of heap space error I still haven t figured out why some
207. nd 1489 drivers back to back but haven t had the time Rod Morimoto 1107 Oregon Ave Palo Alto CA 94303 Fractal Parameters I received my first issue of Micro Cornucopia and fed the Mandelbrot Set Generator routine into my Turbo C compiler After a few trials and errors it generated a fair sample of the set produced as a screen dump of CGA graphics using DOS s GRAPHICS COM A colleague of mine Rick Daley requested a copy and produced the enclosed sketch of a Mandelbrot Buddha See Figure 1 I found it amusing enough to pass it along Since I m aware of how difficult it is to do technical writing and to decide what to put in and what to leave out I m reluctant to be criti cal of such a nice and useful article as Draw ing The Mandelbrot And Julia Sets It would however have been extremely helpful if the plot had been accompanied by its range And had some interesting zoom ranges been included naive experimenters could have saved themselves a lot of time A friend sug gested several ranges that I haven t tried yet See first three lines of Figure 2 I ve been told that a cutoff of 256 iterations works nicely for the first two and 512 iterations works well for the third Gregory K Landheim 349 Almond St Salt Lake City UT 84103 Figure 1 Formal Mandelbrot Buddha Editor s note Gregory s right Infinitely many choices for Mandelbrot parameters means we also have infini
208. nd In formation Retrieval Ellis Horwood J Wiley amp Sons 1986 Hinton G Learning in Parallel Net works BYTE April 1985 Hinton G T Sejnowski amp D Ackley Boltzmann Machines Constraint Satisfaction Networks that Learn Carnegie Mellon Technical Report CMU CS 84 119 1984 Hinton G T Sefnowski amp D Ackley A Learning Algorithm for Boltzmann Machines Cognitive Science Vol 9 pp 147 169 1985 Hoppensteadt F C An Introduction to the Mathematics of Neurons Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1986 Lindsay P H amp D A Norman Human Information Processing Academic Press New York 1977 McClelland J L D E Rumelhart amp the PDP Research Group Parallel Dis tributed Processing Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition Volume 2 Psychological and Biological Models A Bradford Book MIT Press Cambridge MA 1986 McCorduck P Machines Who Think W H Freeman amp Co New York 1979 Minsky M amp S Papert Perceptrons MIT Press Cambridge MA 1968 Rumelhart D E J L McClelland amp the PDP Research Group Parallel Dis tributed Processing Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition Volume 1 Foundations A Bradford Book MIT Press Cambridge MA 1986 Torras i Genis C Temporal Pattern Learning in Neural Models Lecture Notes in Biomathematics Springer Verlag Berlin 1985 ComeSeeMicroC At The West Coast Computer Faire We re having a Micro Cornuc
209. ne separated by spaces For the ST4026 you should key in 615 4 616 300 11 6 Which is to say 615 cylinders 4 heads no reduced write current think about it write precompensation starting at cylinder 300 the DOS standard error burst length of 11 I don t know what it means either and a step rate code of 6 See Figure 4 For further formidable details see Western Digital s WX1 manual and Seagate s ST 4026 OEM Manual Warren Allen 439 Main St Bennington VT 05201 Tired of the same old white water Want a truly exciting memorable way to spend Thursday July 14 While ordinary folks face death in tiny boats you could be having the time of your life You could be enjoying a day long Introduction to Desktop Publishing featuring those desktop ne er do wells from Micro C Carol Steffy Sandy Thompson and David Thompson You ll be introduced to scanning Ventura ing PageMaking graphics generation laser printers the works Not only will you understand how desktop works but you ll also have a better idea what you will and won t need to get started Sign up yourself your spouse your boss everyone and join us July 14 in Bend OR for this kickoff of SOG VI Only 65 00 including lunch and barbeque cookout To register fill out the SOG order form in this Issue or call 1 800 888 8087 Integrand s new Chassis System is not another IBM mechanical and electrical clone An entirely fre
210. ne without the right Linkable Library Post Mortem Debugger m ultiple overlapping windows and debugging tools With the powerful Point Editor color support make it easy to manage Logitech Modula 2 Debuggers you o DOOTTECH Module 169 parts of one file or several files on the can debug your code fast and Library sources Laikex Rut Tie Debus screen at one time You ll love using dramgticasly improve your overall ger MAKE Decoder Version XRef it with or without a mouse project throughput i LOGITECH Modula 2 ST we vere TTT TTT Fe VNMS The Post Mortem O vat Development S eN 249 Cali io inilo hanon anet OUr NARAT V MS eee Debugger analyzes Compiler Pack plus Toolkit version Site License University Discounts J SSE Dealer amp Distributor pricing Om eerie Turbo Pascal to Sat P T Modula 2 Translator FREE To plices dar ealitolkaees after it has terminated A o place an order call toll free S minate With Compiler Pack or Development System 800 231 7717 while the dynamic O Window Package z A Run Time Debugger monitors the execu Pa ie suiniowing into your 49 In Calitornia E 3 oduia 2 code tion of a program with user defined O Upgrade Package 800 552 8885 break points With their new mouse CAN POCITEC H for tfaeir based multiple window user interface EEE E eee these powerful debugging tools area ENANS PA sana tat eal pleasure to uge in U S only Total Enclosed __ O VISA 0 MasterCard Check En
211. ng When XY addresses are used one of the B registers specifies the screen origin And when the source is a binary array the foreground and background colors are held in the B registers Instructions with two operands have 10 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 the form Operation Source Destina tion The source comes first then the destination For example add a0 al adds a0 to al and stores the result in al This requires some adjustment for programmers used to Intel processors We use double registers in the multi ply and divide instructions Double registers are even and odd pairs with the even register holding the most sig nificant bits For example mpys a1 a0 multiplies a1 and a0 and puts the top 32 bits in a0 and the bottom 32 bits in a1 Figure 2 is the implementation of 32 bit signed fixed point multiplication 32 bit integer multiplication is one machine instruction on the 34010 The result is 64 bits wide and is put into two 32 bit registers x x t a x 2 If we run this long enough x will be come the square root of a Figure 3 com putes the square root The push instruction has a strange name mmtm The first instruction in Figure 3 is mmtm sp a4 a5 a6 This instruction says to push registers a4 a5 and a6 mmtm stands for move multi ple to memory The pop instruction is mmfm for move multiple from memory btst is the bit test instruction dsjne
212. ng we want to know what object our ray intersects first The time parameter answers this so we often don t need the actual point of intersec tion Of course when we want to know the point of intersection we can easily compute it from t Just use the equation for a point on a ray P S t D A Rectangle A plane is often too large an object Usually our flat objects will be rec tangles A rectangle is embedded in a plane so we add boundary information to the plane information to specify a rectangle and Y axes Define the plane which em beds the rectangle When we define a plane the origin is arbitrary Any point on the plane can serve as well as any other for the origin This time pick the upper left corner of the rectangle as the origin Put a vector on the top edge of the rectangle by starting at the origin and going to the top right side Call this vector the X ex tent and define the Y extent along the left side in a similar fashion A point P lies on the rectangle if it s to the right of the origin but not farther to the right than the X extent and below the origin and but not further below than the Y extent We can test this by verifying that the numbers which come from calibrating the vector from the upper left corner to P with respect to both the X extent and the Y extent are between 0 and 1 A general rectangle isn t restricted to orientation with respect to the coor dinate axes We can
213. ngs Whenever the field size is changed it s changed back to the original setting as soon as possible The 34010 move instruction has the form MOVE lt sre gt lt dst gt lt F gt where lt src gt is the source operand lt dst gt is the destination operand lt F gt is the field operand F is either 0 or 1 if it s omitted zero is assumed Most of the move instruc Figure 4 Basic Vector Arithmetic data for intermediate values vTemp0 space 60H text vMove 7Out a9 a8 move a8 px a0 1 move a0 a9 px 1 move a8 py a0 1 move a0 a9 py 1 move a8 pz a0 1 move a0 a9 pz 1 rets vAdd Out al0 a8 a9 move a8 px a0 1 move a9 px al 1 add al a0 move a0 al0 px 1 move aB py a0 1 move a9 py al 1 add al a0 move a0 al0 py 1 move a8 pz a0 1 move a9 pz al 1 add al a0 move a0 al0 pz 1 rets vSub Out al0 a8 a9 move a8 px a0 1 move a9 px al 1 sub al a0 move a0 al0 px 1 move aB py a0 1 a9 py al 1 al a0 a0 al0 py 1 a8 pz a0 1 a9 pz al 1 al a0 a0 al0 pz 1 tions in the accompanying code involve 32 bit operations and so they end with 1 Many addressing modes are pos Figure 4 Basic Vector Arithmetic continued H sible set et ae Multiply x components calla fxMultiply R register move a0 a4 start accumulating sum R indirect move xa8
214. nistic predi cates But unlike Prolog Trilogy is the only available logic programming language offering constraint satisfaction Con straints eliminate blind backtracking by solving systems of equations and ine qualities I can illustrate the constraints of Tril ogy with an example which I have inten tionally simplified to the bare essentials A Small Puzzle Given three first name initials A B C and three last name initials DE F find the initials of three 26 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 the constraints are AD BE and CF The Prolog program see Figure 8 must generate all 6 permutations before it can find the correct one by a satisfaction test Note that the Prolog test B lt gt f cannot be executed until the variable B has be come instantiated by the predicate per mute In Trilogy there are no such restric tions the above is simply remembered as a constraint on the solution You can see from the program in Figure 9 that there s no need for explicit generation of can didates for solutions Note that variables in Trilogy start with small letters whereas constants being proper names are capitalized Prolog uses just the opposite convention which seems to us slightly counterintui tive The types of the first and last name initials are defined in Trilogy as enumerated types The predicate Names is satisfied by an array n correlating the first names indices to the
215. nitials using Prolog constructs called var and nonvar The Prolog engine always knows whether a variable has a value or not The implementers made this visible to the programmer The construct var X succeeds if X has no value It fails other wise nonvar is the negation of var The constructs are called extra logical since X 2 var X fails whereas var X X 2 succeeds Hence there is no way to give a logical meaning to var X Nevertheless programmers quickly realized that by using var they could draw the same inferences as humans do when solving this kind of problem Imagine a 3 by 3 matrix of zeros and ones with first initials as rows and last Performance and versatility For your CP M or MS DOS computer QP M QP M by MICROCode Consulting Fed up with the message BDOS error R O With QP M you ll never lose another file because you changed a diskette QP M Offers full CP M 2 2 compatibility with outstanding performance and more commands WITHOUT eating up precious program space Get such features as automatic disk relogging simple drive user selection using either a colon or semi colon 31 user areas drive search path multiple program command line archive bit maintanence and transparent time date stamping all in the same space as CP M 2 2 Installs from a convenient customization menu no software assembly required Bootable disks available with CBIOS for Kaypro Xerox 8 or 54 1 or 2 amp BB
216. noia often preclude its use not without good reason William E Weinman 1800 S Robertson Blvd Ste 206 Los Angeles CA 90035 Editor s note Thanks Bill And thanks for agreeing to speak at SOG a talk en titled C Isn t The Devil s Own Language C Vs Assembly Language Two Mr Isaacson raises a few good points in his article but I must point out a few incorrect and unduly harsh items First let me say that C compilers especially for PCs have been greatly improved in the last couple of years The code generated by Mr Isaacson s compiler doesn t look like the code that comes out of Microsoft C vs 5 0 MSC doesn t save SI or DI unless they re used in the function It also leaves values in registers if con venient which happens often with pointers that are used more than once It may be true that Mr Isaacson s compiler limited him to seven charac ter names But a Unix port I ve used allowed 32 characters while the as sembler had an eight character limit Continued on page 70 LIST OURS TURBO PASCAL ADD ONS ASCII TURBO GHOST WRITER STARTER NEW 99 89 COMPLETE NEW 289 259 FEATURED PRODUCTS NDP FORTRAN 386 Fast globally optimizing compiler for the 80386 Use up to 4 gigabytes per unit to generate programs procedures and arrays A full implementation of FORTRAN 77 with popular extensions Output ie assembly language Requires PharLap ASM L List 595 Special Price 545
217. nsiderable advantages in using 2 as the base as we ll see presently So from now on we ll use log to mean logarithm to the base 2 One advantage in using 2 as the base works like this the uncertainty as sociated with 8 outcomes is log 8 3 Tel since 2 raised to the power 3 is 8 We could think of this 3 as the number of characters we need for representing 8 dif ferent alternatives if we use a character set which has only 2 characters For example if we use only the two characters 0 and 1 we know we can have the 8 alternative codes 000 001 010 011 100 101 110 and 111 More generally with a string of K characters each of which is a 0 or a 1 we can have 2 raised to the power K alternative patterns The first character can be a 0 or 1 and corresponding to this the second can be a 0 or 1 giving us 2 2 possible patterns With 3 we can have 2 2 2 possible patterns and so on until we get 2 raised to the power K patterns for K characters So the amount of uncertainty with 2 raised to the power N alternatives is N units Now we can say that the amount of uncertainty in a situation with N alter natives is the minimum number of characters required to code a different message to represent the different alter natives using a two character alphabet 0 and 1 for coding The word minimum above is im portant If we have two alternatives the minimum string length we need for rep
218. nt more performance and flexibility from your Kaypro With the KayPLUS ROM set you can have the advantages of a Kaypro 4 or 10 even on your Kaypro 2 Install up to four floppies and two hard drives e Boots from floppy or hard disk e Supports 96 TPI and 31 2 disk drives e Can use any ST506 type hard drive 5 to 64 Meg e 32 character type ahead keyboard buffer e Automatic screen blanking not avail on 83 series e 12 disk formats built in unlimited configurable e Full automatic disk relogging with QP M Internal real time clock support e No software assembly required Includes manual format configuration diagnostics sysgen diskette customization utility AND hard disk utilities Available for 83 and 84 series Kaypros KayPLUS ROM Set specify model KayPLUS ROM Set with QP M Parts and accessories for the Kaypro Kaypro 2X Real time Clock parts kit Kaypro 2X Hard disk interface parts kit Kaypro 10 or 84 series Hard Disk host board Kaypro four drive floppy decoder board Complete parts and repair services available Xerox 820 PLUS2 ROM and X120 Double Density Board by MICROCode Consulting and Emerald Microware About had it with single density diskettes on your Xerox 820 1 Get unsurpassed versatility with our X120 Board and PLUS2 ROM package e Run up to four floppy disk drives at once e Mix 8 and 5 at the same time e Software compatible with Kaypro and Xerox 820 e Built in drivers for most serial and paralle
219. ntersects a rectangle first determine the point where the ray intersects the plane which contains the rectangle Then ask whether the point of intersection lies on the rectangle A Sphere Representing a sphere is very straightforward A sphere is given by a center point C and a radius r We can use the dot product to measure dis tance So a point P is on a sphere if R C P c r By recalling the formula for a point on a ray we see that a ray intersects a sphere at time t where S t D C S t D C r I ll spare you the details of the al gebra but this can be put into the standard form for quadratic equations att b tt c 0 where a DebD b 2 D P C c P C P C r SO t b b 4ac Part 2 That s it for theory In part two IIl get into the details of implementing these ideas on the 34010 If you have questions that won t wait until next time drop me a line or two Locate C Bugs before they Bite with PC lint PC lint will analyze your C programs one or many modules and uncover glitches bugs quirks and inconsistencies It will catch subtle errors before they catch you By examining multiple modules PC lint enjoys a perspective your compiler does not have Andrew Binstock The C Gazette Stephen D Cooper Blue Notes San Francisco PC Users Group ld Don Malpass IEEE Software Gimpel Software 3207 Ho
220. o activate another program upon a keypress watch INT 9 Returning Status In The Flags We run into another return problem in ConStatFunction It s called by an INT instruction the call from the application program to NewKbdInt which saves the flags on the stack before calling An IRET in the calling procedure would then restore the flags from before the INT destroying that Z flag we worked so hard to set up That s why in ConStatFunction I return to the calling program with a RET 2 instead of IRET RET 2 does the same thing as a normal RET But after popping the return address off the stack it adds an extra 2 to the stack pointer effectively popping the old flags without ruining the new flags Also notice that I declared ConStat Function as a FAR procedure This was necessary to force the assembler to generate a FAR return returning to a different segment instead of a NEAR return return to a point in the same segment This isn t necessary for the other sub functions ConinFunction and ShiftStat Function since they do IRETs and there s only one kind of IRET I could have declared all the other procedures in the program as NEAR or FAR but putting in a PROC declaration takes a matching ENDP line and I m lazy The ALT Key The only other aspect of TURKKEYS that bears explaining other than Why would anyone in Minnesota want to be typing Turkish text is the special handling of the ALT
221. o short or too long PC Style also reports the grade level of your 6 00 i z To Order PC Type uses the dictionary on this disk i i Call Each For U S Subscribers for its spell check function 503 382 5060 or MS48 PC Dial and PC Graph 1 800 888 8087 Next in the line up of Buttonware Malling Address products comes PC Dial This Micro Cornucopia communications program supports P O Box 223 scripts and macros has a built in Bend Oregon 97709 mini editor and talks up to 9600 baud Any database or report file created with PC File can be graphed using PC Graph Prices each postpaid This program requires the Color Graphics 6 00 for U S Subscribers to Micro C Adapter 8 00 for non subscribers amp foreign 90 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 BERLASGCCKTSPATESSUVEFSVECTTPSKRSFERHERPAESTHEETSSSKHBABSSEHESEEE TEAR HERE ESEMSBSBGASRKERTHEHD ESSERE TAERBERSF STRESSES MERSESEHRRRETZAT Bee eee TEAR HERE BPRS TTR ESASSSH SH AASSSSRPOTC TSS SSMS SRGSE BB eSesan ORDERFORM POSTAGE PAID SELF MAILER Tear out fold and staple both ends if check is enclosed EAEN THE MICRO TECHNICAL JOURNAL O YES WANT TO SUBSCRIBE se ince 41 L NEW DISKS cote OTHER PRODUCTS Back Issues T shirts specify size O MS DOS 3 Specify Disk and size J CHECK ENCLOSED U S funds drawn on a U S bank please LJ VISA J RENEWAL aT ee yr 2 yrs 3 yrs
222. o the 8088 tell ing the processor that it can reclaim the bus on the next clock cycle During the 8087 s bus activity the BIU naps It goes into an inactive state Tj When it wakes up it goes to T4 and we re off and run ning again Another important pin in 8087 sys tems is the TEST pin The 8087 and 8088 can operate concurrently But often we want the 8088 to wait for the results of an 8087 operation before continuing The as sembly instruction wait forces the 8088 into an idling condition It idles until it sees a low on TEST This pin connects directly to the 8087 s BUSY output So as soon as the 8087 s done the 8088 can continue Wait instructions also show up before most 8087 instructions This guarantees that the 8087 will be finished with its last task before getting a new one Interrupts Etc A high on the interrupt request IREQ line during T4 means a hardware interrupt needs service If the interrupt enable flag is set the interrupt sequence begins If not the 8088 continues execut ing code until interrupts are reenabled Nonmaskable interrupts NMI are caused by any of three error conditions memory parity errors I O bus errors or interrupts from the 8087 In each case the processor automatically executes inter rupt 2 the NMI handler This ROM code tries to locate the source of error prints a semi informative message on the screen and halts the system Actually nonmaskable
223. o the next statement procedure calls in one step e J like trace but always forward in the source e G lt bkpt gt executes until break point set here reached e GM lt bkpt gt like G but when the set breakpoint is reached it checks the permanent and tem porary breakpoints and stops if any reached e GT trace T with breakpoint monitor at every statement slow Tdebug knows about graphics for all of the above tracing commands the debug screen is swapped with the program s output screen unless the noswap option in the command is used The possible problems you may encounter with some graphics adapters are detailed in the manual I had no problems in my testing Each time you return to the debug screen the program s screen is saved and the debugging windows updated Variables can be examined modified by name or address with the E com mand The W command sets up watch variables The D command opens the memory window and allows viewing of variables in any of 14 different formats Again these commands are fully sym bolic The E command automatically determines the type of the variable for its display but type casting can be used to force a different representation The TB command is used to show how did we get here information It examines the stack and provides a traceback all the way to the main program Tdebug has some additional fea tures It can use either extended or ex panded me
224. of the hangar so you ll have a dry space for sleep ing Bend has a published VOR approach Redmond 10 miles north has ILS and FAA flight service makes it a good alter nate Bend has 100 low lead and Jet A for the Stinson of course Redmond has 100LL Jet A and unleaded auto fuel at Butler Aviation Bend s runway is paved north south 16 34 5 000 ft long 3200 ft elevation Bend unicom is 123 0 and is monitored by the FBO during daylight hours Amateur radio operators who are flying in might also monitor 146 52 simplex Ground bound hams should monitor the Bend repeater 146 94 34 If you d like to join the fly in call Bill Davidson at PC Tech 612 345 4555 He ll be coordinating transportation to and from the college and he s organizing some social to do s Other Ways To Bend You can drive to Bend if you live on the West Coast or you can fly into a commercial airport and drive We re 11 hours by car from San Francisco 6 hours from Seattle 5 hours from Boise Idaho 3 hours from Portland Oregon 2 1 2 hours from Eugene Oregon or 15 minutes from Redmond Oregon Redmond has the only commercial airport in the area and it s served by three regional airlines However you ll often pay more to get from Portland to Redmond than from New York to Portland A lot of people fly to Portland rent a car and drive to Bend There are two major routes from Portland to Bend and both are beautiful drives across the Cascade
225. ok Carol keeps right next to her full page monitor and it s the one the rest of us borrow carefully after hours Desktop Publishing With Style Ventura Tips And Tricks 19 95 448 pages 15 95 286 pages ISBN 0 89708 162 5 ISBN 0 938151 01 0 And Books Peachpit Press 702 South Michigan 2127 Woolsey St South Bend IN 46618 Berkeley CA 94705 415 843 6614 Help I m looking for information on database programs If you ve had experience with one program or a bunch I want you Write log onto the RBBS call me whatever Send an outline short synopsis a disk a desk your mother return postage with mothers please anything that tells us what you re into I d like to do a complete look at databases We re talking database design Database utilities dBASE II compilers inter preters look alikes Menu driven database creators and report generators SQL Everything Finally See you at SOG get those database cards and letters in the mail today keep your chin up and your nose to the grindstone because that s it from greater Bend David Thomps ALL SALES SUBJECT TO THE TERMS OF OUR 90 DAY LIMITED WARRANTY FREE COPY UPON REQUEST CALL FOR FREE CATALOG TEXT TO SPEECH BOARD PC XT COMPATIBLE MAKE YOUR COMPUTER TALK A VERY POWERFUL AND AMAZING SPEECH CARD USES THE NEW GENERAL INSTRUMENTS SPO0256 AL2 SPEECH CHIP AND THE CTS256A AL2 TEXT TO SPEECH CONVERTER THIS BOARD USES ONE SLOT ON THE MOTHERBOARD AND REQUI
226. on AEN ena bling the 8288 s command outputs AEN also enables the output of both LS373s before ALE triggers the address latching In addition it latches A8 through A11 into an LS244 So now we have all 20 bits of address safely out on the address bus At the end of the ALE pulse a new combination of outputs on the 8088 s status lines brings another 8288 signal lf You Don t Have WindowDOS 2 0 _ You re Wasting Time When Baba Ram Dass said Be here now remember designers of hard disk utilities should have paid heed A powerful manager like XTREE can track files and subdirectories and execute DOS commands but it isn t mem ory resident Handy pop up DOS commanders like PopDOS may be here now but they lack the power of a full fledged disk manager After much meditation the developers of WindowDOS 2 0 have come up with the best answer yet to the guru s paradox Until now the closest thing to a real RAM resident disk manager was version 1 0 of WindowDOS If offered a full screen pop up menu and could rename copy and delete files But it couldn t move files format disks or rename subdirectories which XTREE can Now version 2 0 is here and its a winner Its RAM resident using less than 50K but offers all the power of a nonresident disk manager Patrick Marshall WindowDOS 2 0 Product Review PC World May 1987 Once you ve experienced the convenience of instant access to DOS commands you
227. onWare s public relations and ad vertising specialist The California Swing Jim was spreading the word about shareware s success and users were eager to hear it In Sacramento alone over five hundred people were on hand to listen to him The father of user supported software was telling his half of the shareware story and he was talking to people who had helped to make it happen All good programming projects never come to an end he said describing how his little label program blossomed into the flagship of ButtonWare s fleet of shareware products PC File started its life as an AppleSoft BASIC program running on an Apple II It stored sorted and printed labels Gradually however it began to look more like a database When IBM announced its PC in 1981 Jim Button lined up with his fellow Big Blue employees for a new microcomputer Unable to meet the immediate demand IBM advised But ton that a PC would be his in only nine months Undaunted Jim began using his lunch hours at work to convert his label program to the PC Jim casually shared his program with his colleagues all of whom were eager for some thing to run on their PCs Then it happened 58 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 They started feeding me requirements he said Without realizing it he had gone into the software business As his program passed hand to hand Jim found himself getting update re quests from people he didn
228. op displays the maj VEDIT PLUS is an advanced editor that makes your program development and word do processing as efficient and easy as possible VEDIT PLUS is simple enough to learn and use for the novice yet has the clrscreen scrlines 20 speed Flexibility and power to satisfy shoul main menu the most demanding computer professional ret_val getrange mm_pro VEDIT PLUS is particularly suited for process ret_val new_ved uriting all types of programs and lengthy while ret_val t EXIT_OK J documents such as reports or manuscripts ria INSERT Et scrlines SCRLINES scruidth CRWIDTH sp 2 This shows how MEDIT PLUS can perform windowing One window is used for word processing a s cond for program if neu_vedit amp amp table_in printf crt_sel if yesnol setert ar development and the third for commands else outcrlf Up to 40 windows are supported and you determine each window s size and color j UINDOU DIRECTORY C VEDIT NEW COMPARE UDM CV203 UDM MAIL SORT VDM STRIPV UDH MENU VDM 288 8886 VDM DM PRINT VDM Stunning speed Unmatched performance Total flexibil ity Simple and intuitive operation The newest VEDIT PLUS defies comparison Try A Dazzling Demo Yourself The free demo disk is fully functional you can try all features yourself Best the demo includes a dazzling menu driven tutorial you experiment in one window while anothe
229. operations as well as control flags And the code segment CS data seg ment DS stack segment SS and extra segment ES registers provide part of the addressing information There are in addition several temporary and internal communication registers inaccessible to the outside world But I ve never seen these documented very well so I can t tell you anything about them Execution Unit The EU includes the general purpose registers flags and arithmetic logic unit ALU The flags live in a single 16 bit register See Figure 1 Six flags contain operation status information did the operation result in a carry or a borrow did the result overflow the capacity of its destination was the result positive or negative what was the parity of the result was the result zero The other three flags perform the 8088 control functions Setting the direction flag makes string instructions process strings from high to low addresses Resetting the flag reverses the processing direction Figure 1 8088 Flags Register w p t Function carry unused parity unused auxiliary carry unused zero sign trap interrupt enable direction overflow unused 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 With the interrupt enable flag set the 8088 recognizes external interrupt re quests On the PC external interrupts come in from the 8259 interrupt control ler and can be initiated by a real time clock tick
230. opia booth at the West Coast Computer Faire April and anything else 10 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco yi we re in 951 and say hi to Dave Thompson Larry Fogg mapa and Bruce Eckel We by ary Ibe glad to talk about article ideas Note We won t be offering technical phone help between April 5 and April 11 DISPLAY PAGING RECEIVER Designed for use in a nation wide paging system Dual conv superhet 450 MHz crystal controlled receiver module plug in module e Twenty character alpha numeric LED display ASCII Encoded ANSI character set RCA CDP 1802 Processor based display mode controller Piezoelectric beeper unit APPLICATIONS Receiver module may be removed for other uses Receiver could be recrystaled for Ham Radio Use Possible to use for original application on Ham Bands Terrific source of parts UNITS ARE COMPLETE BUT UNTESTED amp SOLD AS IS 1995 Npn LITTON TRACKBALL 250 CYCLES PER REVOLUTION 5 VDC OPERATION SPEC SHEET INCLUDED 39 95 XEBEC 1410 SASI HARD DISK CONTROLLER 89 00 RS 232 BREAK OUT BOX SWITCHABLE LINES LED INDICATORS PATCH TERMINALS amp JUMPERS COMPACT SIZE 3 1 95 COMPUTER JOYSTICK IBM APPLE COMPATIBLE AT XT 4 SLOT MOTHER BOARD EXPANDER INCLUDES 4 SLOT XT MOTHERBOARD OPTIONAL AT CONNECTORS e CABLING CASE NOT INCLUDED GREAT FOR R amp D 6995 HALF HEIGHT EXTERNAL DR
231. or 25 AutoTrace program tracer and memory trasher ernie NS ae GRR ht ge iat ial sea Get ae te Mas dot a ae 25 C Compiler Torture Test checks a C compiler against K amp R 2 2 eee ee eee 20 Benchmark Package C compiler PC hardware and Unix system 2 20 TN3270 remote login to IBM VM CMS as a 3270 terminal on a 3274 controller 20 A68 68000 cross assembler 1 2 1 we a ee 20 List Pac C functions for lists stacks and queues 2 1 1 1 ee ee ee ee te ee es 20 XLT Macro Processor general purpose text translator 1 1 ee ee ee ee 20 Data WordCruncher text retrieval amp document analysis program e s e 1 ee ee ee ee 275 DNA Sequences GenBank 52 0 including fast similarity search program 150 Protein Sequences 5 415 sequences 1 302 966 residuals with similarity search program 60 Webster s Second Dictionary 234 932 words 1 1 s ee ee ee ee 60 U S Cities names amp longitude latitude of 32 000 U S cities and 6 000 state boundary points 35 The World Digitized 100 000 longitude latitude of world country boundaries 30 KST Fonts 13 200 characters in 139 mixed fonts specify T X or bitmap format 30 USNO Floppy Almanac high precision moon sun planet amp star positions 20 NBS Hershey Fonts 1 377 stroke characters in 14 fonts 2 eee eee ee ee eee 15 U S Map 15 701 poin
232. or vector corresponding to the output of a unique visible unit We train the system on a set of such patterns by fixing or clamping the visible units to represent each pattern in turn In the testing mode we show part of a pattern to the neural net and it com pletes the pattern by itself For example suppose we teach the machine the pat tern 10101 along with some other pat terns Then in the testing mode it will reproduce the pattern 10101 from a pat tern that uniquely defines it for example aT We can further classify associative learning into two categories depending on which part of the pattern we show the network in the testing phase i Auto association we show the system any sufficiently large set of ar bitrarily chosen components of the pat tern Each pattern is then associated with itself hence the name auto association For example we could train a system using a set of patterns representing photographs of our friends Then suppose that during the testing mode we show the system a picture of one of our friends now wearing sunglas ses Ideally the system will react filling in all the missing features of the picture those covered by the sunglasses and come up with the right identification ii Pattern Association where each pattern is divided into two separate pat terns the input pattern and the output pattern The goal is to train the system to as sociate input pattern
233. ory of information was developed in specific relation to the all day long ell S great Show Me the pop up multi window file viewer allows you to browse print search and paste from any file New Version III adds EMS and LAN support multi file text search and more Our customers swear by Show Me You will too Escape through the windows of Show Me Call for your FREE demo disk 800 634 3122 Single user version 59 95 unlimited user network version 119 95 Add 5 shipping amp handling Visa amp Mastercard accepted Unconditional 90 day satisfaction guarantee Serengeti Software P O Box 27254 Austin Texas 78755 Reader Service Number 27 46 MICROCORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 transmission of messages by telegraph telephone and so on its general scope has led to continuing extensions of its ap plications see references below In particular it applies not just to transmission of information but to storage as well You can think of storage of information as transmission with a delay between recording sending the message and retrieving it By associating the quantity of infor mation in a message with the uncertainty which a message resolves Shannon was able to develop a simply brilliant field of knowledge which has led to deeper un derstanding of what information is and how it can be best handled Of course the theory has some limita tions in that it considers the number of p
234. ossible messages as the key quantity We would say from our human perspec tive that a set of two messages you ll get a million dollars you won t get it isn t the same as the set you ll get one dollar you won t get it although each has an entropy of 1 s_bit We think of the first set as being more meaningful or having greater seman tic significance Shannon carefully pointed out in his book that the semantic aspects of com munication are irrelevant to the engineer ing problem However in the years since the theory was developed there have been continu ing efforts to incorporate the semantic angle as well Reference 3 in particular is an excellent source for an overview of this aspect of the theory of information References 1 Shannon C E and Weaver W The Mathematical Theory of Communication Urbana IL University of Illinois Press 1964 2 Usher M J Information Theory for Technologists London U K Macmillan Publishers 1984 3 Campbell J Grammatical Man New York N Y Simon and Schuster 1982 4 Bharath R Information Theory BYTE December 1987 pages 291 298 New Lower Prices for CP M VEDIT Version 1 40 49 Single file no windows e VEDIT PLUS Version 2 32 79 Multiple file no windows e VEDIT PLUS Version 2 33 95 Current version with windows LINE 15 COL 16 FILE PHOTO 203 INDOW 1 Hain lo
235. ot ting routines curve fitting pie charts or histograms this package may be for you One especially good feature of the window system is the world coordinate concept Each window can have its own coordinate system independent of its physical screen coordinates For in stance a window can be created whose world includes only X and Y values between 1 and 1 even though it fills the screen This can make plotting of real life values easier Turbo Professional V 4 0 This package from the Tdebug people rates an unqualified WOW In it you ll find routines for Fast windows and screen I O XEROX 820 1 AND 820 2 ITEMS Reconditioned Assembled and Tested 820 1 COMPUTER MONITOR COMPLETE 820 2 COMPUTER MONITOR COMPLETE W CONTROLLER fos 95 820 COMPUTER MONITOR NO MAIN BOARD A gt HIGH PROFILE KEYBOARD COMPLETE 820 1 MAIN COMPUTER BOARD FULLY POPULATED BOARDS As 820 2 MAIN COMPUTER BOARD spf Wat FULLY POPULATED BOARDS 820 2 FLOPPY CONTROLLER BOARD bi A a fy p DUAL 8 SSDD DIS DUAL 8 DISK DRIA iy 5 174 p Brsx DRIVE CABLE 8 DUA HUSK DRIVE CABLE RS 232 ABLES LINE CORDS 3 280 B 6MHz 3 Z80 H 8MHz 9 e ER 125 i DRI ES ENCLOSURE COMPLETE 175 CABINET NO DRIVES 5 E2I COMPUTER PRODUCTS 2273 AMERICAN AVE 8 e Virtual screens e PopUp windows e Pulldown menus e Line editor very small but very useful e Long up to 65
236. ould say that the information we ve received is the sum of the uncertainty associated with 4 outcomes plus the uncertainty as sociated with 8 outcomes But we could also say that the total in formation we ve received is the resolu tion of uncertainty associated with 32 outcomes If we use the symbol H N for the amount of uncertainty associated with N outcomes we could describe the race uncertainty this way H 32 H 4 H 8 This argument is perfectly general so we can say that H m n H m H n where m and n can be any numbers In other words the quantity of infor mation conveyed by messages is addi tive Logarithms amp Uncertainty Shannon showed that the only mathe matical function which has this additive property is the logarithm The logarithm of any number A to a particular base B is the power to which the base B should be raised to get the number A For example since 1000 10 raised to the power 3 the logarithm of 1000 to the base 10 is 3 and similarly since 32 is 2 raised to the power 5 the logarithm of 32 to the base 2 is 5 and so on Two other important properties of logarithms are 1 the logarithm of 1 to any base is 0 2 log a b log a log b If a message has one possible out come there is no uncertainty so H 1 is 0 and the logarithmic measure fits in with this as well The uncertainty H could be measured using any base for the logarithms but there are co
237. pace and other media information Check and set the time and date Benefits Saves Time No waiting to exit or reload programs Instant access to DOS functions whatever your current task Easily saves 10 or more minutes a day Comprehensive Broad range of commands including many not supplied by DOS Satisfies the needs of both new and advanced users Simplifies DOS No need to remember exact DOS commands Intuitive interface and point and shoot design saves keystrokes and prevents mistakes Group file tagging avoids the drudgery of repetitive commands Security Capability to hide un hide subdirectories password lock a computer and check for un wanted programs in RAM helps secure data and prevent unauthor ized access Other Information Not copy protected Uses only 51K of memory Supports EGA amp Hercules Runs memory resident or as a stand alone program Uninstall command PC XT AT 100 Compatibles Order Today Only 49 95 WindowDOS Associates Box 300488 C Arlington Tx 76010 817 467 4103 Reader Service Number 14 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 39 into play Data transmit receive DT R controls the direction of an LS245 octal bus transceiver The LS245 provides the multiplex ing demultiplexing and I O functions between the 8088 and the data bus The 8288 is now sending a high on DT R tell ing the LS245 that this will be a write operation
238. page monitor with a resolution of 800 x 1024 at 2 bits pixel So much for the claustrophobia What about speed What about 6 MIPs And that 10 Mhz 286 doesn t hurt either I never thought I d consider using Microsoft Windows as a development environment Now I m not sure When I first tried Windows it was version 1 03 on a Hercules card Slow awkward tiny little tiled windows Now that I ve got Windows 2 03 with its new overlapping windows run ning in native mode on the PC Tech 34010 going into a full page display ve been wishing for a snowy winter for three years ever since left Montana and now lve got my wish three times the dots of a Herc I think maybe it d be okay If someone would just port over a good editor the Win dows NOTEPAD editor sucks and an assembler and C and Modula compilers all communicating with the editor of course maybe I d do it I know you all think I m crazy only a fool would develop his software under an environment so bugridden as Windows But come on guys that was version 1 this is version 2 Anyway Windows doesn t quite fit the bill right now It s overkill All I real ly need is a multi window editor that can integrate with my compilers Oh and it must be able to recognize the extra 41 lines on my full page display And it s gotta be cheap Looking For Mr Good Editor Let s see Everyone s first answer to that is probably Ge
239. peared that all I needed to have a clock were these parts Z80A PIO put in position U35 MM58167A clock chip U36 32 768 KHz crystal Y4 1N4148 diodes two at CR6 and CR7 e 0 1 uF disk capacitor C54 e 22 pF disk capacitors two at C64 and C65 3 volt battery and holder BT1 However there were a couple of problems with the schematic Diode CR6 is shown as a 1001 The only thing the local radio shop had with that number was a transistor The board is drilled and printed identically for CR6 and CR7 with CR7 shown as a 1N4148 diode Since the diodes appeared to have similar functions I assumed a 1N4148 for both The schematic also calls for 20 pF capacitors Thar ain t no sich of a thang I used 22s All of the above parts are available from JDR Microdevices for 19 95 in cluding shipping A little overkill here the 1N4148s come 25 for a dollar Also the 3 volt lithium battery holder doesn t match the board holes exactly I managed to jimmy it in place using one of the snipped capacitor leads as an extension to the plus terminal Anyone finding a better fit can leave 3 45 off the order to JDR I had no difficulty soldering in gingerly all these parts from the top of the board But use the solder sparing ly You can unplug the holes by touch 72 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 CP M Notes ing them with a soldering iron and im mediately plunging in a wooden tooth pick if there s a
240. pers porting a product We ve done it for you Merlin Publishing Group software for publication You get e initial cash payments e generous royalties We need your program Do you have a program that s good enough to sell but don t want the problems or financial risk of producing typesetting printing packaging warehousing marketing distributing and sup Why start your own software house is now accepting submissions of micro computer e to spend your time programming But we can t help you if you don t submit Call or write today for our submission guideline kit tance of the matrix analysis and inter views This work will provide a founda tion for your project so do a thorough job and keep it up to date First Decision Point Once you have completed this matrix you ve reached your first decision point You have enough infor mation to make your first educated stop now or continue decision Look at the matrix and ask How am I going to differentiate myself from everyone else Remember we are discussing a market driven business You are not IBM and even IBM has discovered that customers will not always line up to buy a product just because it says IBM on it When trying to determine how you are going to differentiate your product from competition keep in mind the four P s of the marketing mix Product price promotion place all give you potential opportunities for
241. plan to do some kind of ex periment with it in the coming months Stay tuned Someday Write A Data Base Program end to end in 10 minutes in TPascal 4 0 formerly Turbo GhostWriter Perfect for creating complex business applications Ideal for BASIC pr grammers who find TPascal too tough Spec your customer in the morning Show a demo in the afternoon Features More features screen editor and painter automatic B tree indexing automatic programmer consistent user interface documentation automatic context sensitive automatic data elp checking validation relational model to show plenty of hooks for customizing customizing 30 day money back gaurantee unlimited technical support less 14 shipping handling No questions to answer Just draw your screens the way you want them to appear tell Turbo Programmer how to set up the indexes and that s it Running 4 0 code in 6 seconds with no programming Regular price 450 Now Only 289 Orders amp Info 800 227 7681 ASCII 3239 Mill Run Raleigh NC 27612 4135 Reader Service Number 48 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 35 Intel s 8088 A Tour Through The Brains Of The PC Larry s finally done it He s traversed his way through the primary players we re talk ing 40 pins here in the IBM XT and its clones He s finishing up with the kingpin the heart and soul the chip without whom there would be no others Do I hear a bull fro
242. plementation I m using here will only give valid results if all values stay within a 32 bit range But 32 bits will be plenty Select a screen size which enables each pixel to be about 1000 times larger than the smallest number we can repre sent This will guarantee that any round off error is far smaller than anything we Figure 1 Representation of an object on the screen universe move the eye and screen around To make things more interest ing you can move and alter objects or make them reflective so that rays bounce off and continue on in other directions The resulting game of light ray billiards generates even more fas cinating pictures Editors note Earl generated the graphic on the facing page using PC Tech s 34010 board Arithmetic Floating point arithmetic may seem SCREEN y can display on the screen We place objects so that the typical distance between them is on the order of 1000 pixels This means there are plenty of pixels to resolve the object and the scene will fill the screen So the size of the objects and the dis tances between them are about 1 1000th of the largest number that can be represented And there s enough room to avoid overflow errors MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 9 Fixed Point In fixed point representation we use regular integers but imagine a decimal point binary point at some fixed loca tion The fixed point will be set to the right of bit 16 here
243. pment systems Hosts include PC MS DOS Macintosh CP M Vax PDP 11 Sun and others Call for information and pricing CP M 8080 Z80 ROM C compiler 8080 Z80 assembler linker librarian UNIX libraries and specialized utilities Aztec C Il c CP M amp ROM 349 Aztec C Il d CP M 199 How To Become A User To become an Aztec user call 800 221 0440 From NJ or intemational locations call 201 542 2121 Telex 4995812 or FAX 201 542 8386 C O D VISA Master Card American Express wire domestic and international and terms are available One and two day delivery available for all domestic and most international destinations Aztec Systems bought directly from Manx have a 30 day satisfaction uvarantee Most hae are upgradable paying the difference in pnce plus 10 Site licenses OEM educational and multiple copy discounts are available To ordef or for tA AY ayi aw zw 4 meg Reader Service Number 17 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 Mav Tune 1988 77 A Reliable PC XT Compatible For The Corner Stone of Your Products Announcing The SLY40 XT E The SLY40 XT is a small 4 14 by 9 1 4 four layer card featuring all of the PC XT mother board functions The board simply plugs into a passive back plane or SLICER S 10 slot bus board e High Integration Composed of just 47 Low Power CMOS ICS e NEC s 8 MHZ V40 e One Megabyte of Zero Wait State RAM e 8087 Co Processor Socket e Standa
244. pproach 0 Either way the function is dependable A new science called Chaos which is loose ly the study of feedback or iterative equations has recently challenged this simple notion of predictability demonstrating convincingly that initial values and a function or rate equation aren t always sufficient for prediction rll try to explain and then IlI show you some code which will let you generate Chaos on your PCs Non Linearity amp The Butterfly Effect Let s go back to the equation XNext R X A little thought gives us one reason why it s so predictable it s linear A moment s reflection should convince you that a linear description of behavior or change is the simplest of many possible descriptions just as a straight line is the simplest connection between two points But unfortunately it 82 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 doesn t describe most interesting phenomena in nature waves clouds turbulence biological systems population dynamics ther modynamics the weather oscillation and so on Typically nature requires more complex often non linear equations So let s consider one of if not the simplest non linear equation XNext R X 1 X which describes a familiar shape the parabola It reaches a peak determined by R and then folds down We can say that R expresses the linearity in the system If we start with some initial value of X or Seed value and iter
245. printer pulls this line low off the computer is supposed to stop and wait until the printer raises the line This is a good idea and there are no wires to cross as with Rx and Tx But there are two problems First there is no guarantee the com puter has the hardware to sense the sig nal or the sense to sense the signal For tunately PCs do The only thing you can always assume about an RS 232C port is that it will have Tx and Rx You can t even assume that pin 1 frame ground will work as a signal ground Pin 7 signal ground is the only safe bet Second even if the circuits are in the computer software must watch for the signal or the 8250 must generate an in terrupt This isn t always simple espe cially if the programmer is using BASIC or isn t an engineer In the end if you re designing a device which you want to interface to any computer it s best to avoid using the CTS line In the PC world CTS is the standard handshake Software Handshaking The second solution to the flow control problem is via software Two special characters are defined with XON XOFF flow control these are CONTROL S to stop the flow and CONTROL Q to restart it When the computer receives the STOP character via its Rx pin it stops sending information until it receives the START character The computer can also send out STOP and START characters to con trol data coming from a remote device The advantage
246. procedural languages where the bindings to the variables must be done in an exact sequence The extra logical features of Lisp are the dynamic binding the association lists rplaca setq most 30 years ago and Prolog more than 15 years ago Perhaps it was then impos sible to achieve efficiency without sacrificing logic Today however there is no justifica tion for hacks in declarative languages Efforts to standardize Lisp and Prolog by including features violating logic are mis guided The programming language Trilogy is uncompromising in its logic Trilogy is very efficient but it obtains the efficiency without violating the logic This was achieved by a tight control over the im plementation Whenever we had an im plementation problem or whenever we have seen that we can improve the ef ficiency we have always asked the ques tion of how to do it within the logic The efficiency of Trilogy in non deter ministic cases is achieved by constraints which eliminate blind backtracking The use of types and modes by the Trilogy compiler helps to generate Pascal like code quality in deterministic cases
247. prove that If n gt 0 and p is the smallest number of the form p 2 k such that p gt n then Eval amp P amp y y x x n n MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 23 nl n1 amp y y times x n x x p n 0 nl 0 Thus the program y 1 P computes y xn Schools Of Semantics Our definition of semantics for L is called definition by an abstract machine giving the operational semantics A school of semantics called the denotational semantics was very influen tial a decade ago and claimed that opera tional semantics isn t a proper semantics because it tells us only what a program does without telling us what the program actually is Declarative Languages We can assign meaning to programs independent of a computation machine only if we restrict ourselves to a special kind of programming language called a declarative language We can interpret declarative programs as functions or as relations In the former case we obtain function al languages for instance Lisp in the latter case we obtain logic languages for instance Prolog Trilogy Functions and relations are legal mathematical objects treatable by methods of mathematical logic Declarative programs obtain their meaning via the standard logical method of interpretations Declarative languages have a great Figure 5 Tail Recursive Exponentiation in Trilogy proc Expl x
248. ps the most effective tool to use in 66 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 debugging is a symbolic source code debugger Borland has announced that they are working on debuggers for their products One for Turbo C is due in the first quarter of 1988 with a ver sion for Turbo Pascal to follow Until that time there are alternatives one of which is from Turbo Power Software of Scotts Valley California Tdebug version 4 0 available March 1 provides all the facilities needed to effectively locate any insects such as giant winged tax bills lurking in your code What s Needed What should a source level debugger do At the very least it should provide a means to step through the program and examine the changing values of variables at each step A window into the source with an indication of what statement is to be executed is helpful but at the very least it should display the current source line number It should understand a variable s symbolic name rather than its memory address Breakpoints and passpoints are next in order of importance they let you execute at full tilt until execution reaches a certain point or event How is all this possible The files generated by assemblers and compilers include informa tion about both symbols and the source The linker which then combines these files into an executable program can also produce a map file that provides the information to a debug ger In T
249. py a0 R postincrement indirect move xa9 py al R predecrement indirect calla xMultiply Multiply y components Addr absolute add a0 a4 add to sum R disp indirect with displacement move a8 pz a0 move xa9 pz al Here R is a register name Addr is an a n AN anette z p a a4 a recturn sum o products absolute memory address and disp is a ant sp a4 16 bit signed displacement Nearly any rets combination of source and destination araia addressing modes is possible Out al0 a9 a8 a9 scalar a8 vector Figure 4 shows the 34010 implemen move a8 px a0 1 f 9 al tation of basic vector arithmetic The a A DEM E PEE routine vMove makes a copy of a the move a0 al0 px 1 vector pointed to by a8 at the vector move Fy PY a0 1 A move ay a pointed to by a9 calla fxMultiply scale y component vAdds adds a8 to a9 and stores the move a0 al0 py 1 results in a10 vSub subtracts a9 from a8 ai fg pa a0 1 and stores the result in a10 Each coor calla fxMultiply scale z component dinate in a9 is added or subtracted from move a0 al0 pz 1 z t the matching coordinate in a8 and the aad result is put into a10 vCalibrate vDot returns the dot product of a8 te a0 AN P RRR onto and calibrate by the unit vector a9 ma sS a4 a and a9 in a0 a8 and a9 point to vectors nails ore a9 a8 and a0 is a number vScale stores the move a0 a4 scalar multiplication of a9 and a8 in a10 poate ed Peas 7 x call
250. r gives instructions The powerful macro programming language helps you eliminate repetitive editing tasks The impressive demo tutorial is written entirely as a macro itshows that no other editor s macro language even comes close Go ahead Call for your free demo today You ll see why VEDIT PLUS has been the 1 choice of programmers writers and engineers since 1980 Available for IBM PC Tandy 2000 DEC Rainbow MS DOS CP M 86 and CP M 80 Yes We support windows on most CRT terminals including CRT s connected to an IBM PC Order direct or from your dealer 185 Compare features and speed BRIEF Norton PMATE VEDIT Editor PLUS Off the cuff macros No No Yes Yes Built in macros Yes No Yes Yes Keystroke macros Only1 No No 100 Multiple file editing 20 2 No 20 Windows 20 2 No 20 Macro execution window No No No Yes Trace amp Breakpoint macros No No Yes Yes Execute DOS commands Yes Yes Yes Yes Configurable keyboard Layout Hard No Hard Easy Cut and paste buffers 1 1 1 36 Undo line changes Yes No No Yes Paragraph justification No No No Yes On line calculator No No No Yes Manual size index 250 No 42 No 469 Yes 380 Yes Benchmarks in 120K File 1 15 min 34 sec 1 07 min 6 sec 20sec Cannot Cannot 2sec 2 40 min Cannot Cannot 11 sec 2000 replacements Pattern matching search Pattern matching replace VEDIT and CompuView are registered trademarks of CompuView Products Inc BRIEF is a
251. r more bits of address That 20 bits meant the 8086 family could access 1 meg 64K X 16 Since twenty bits don t fit into a single 16 bit word without data compression Intel used two words to specify a memory location one called the seg ment the other the offset Editor s note I used to wonder why Intel didn t just paste the two addresses together as a 32 bit total Then it could ad dress lots and lots of memory make life easier for new programmers and compete with Motorola s 68000 But I suppose that was too obvious To generate a 20 bit address the seg ment word is shifted 4 bits to the left multiplied by 16 and then added to the offset This gives the 20 bit linear code segment while the DS register contains the current data segment A near address is faster because the processor doesn t have to load a new value into a segment register However a near address can only range over a 64K area while a far address reaches any location within a megabyte Memory Models There are several ways of using seg mented memory when creating a program and this is where the concept of memory models was born Many compilers let you select from six models Turbo C supports all six models Turbo Pascal only supports the Large model Figure 1 shows the various models Sometimes data needs a single un broken space larger than 64K The huge model pastes together segments to create a larger single sp
252. r vDot a8 a8 a9 is a scaler and a8 points to a vector mova a0 al vCalibrate returns the size of the n oa He soiled eal E i A calla xDivide a0 a9 a a8 a projection of a8 onto a9 as a multiple of ein api eas ai the length of a9 The result is returned rets in a0 vProjection puts the projection of ane 8 t 9 into th t 10 vProjection ao onto a into e vector alU v 7Out al0 projection of a8 onto a9 Perpendicular puts the component of a8 mmtm sp a8 a9 perpendicular to a9 into al0 v en ganas get projection multiplier Normalize returns a normalized copy of move a0 a9 a8 in a9 callr vScale scale a9 mnfm sp a8 a9 rets Compound Objects Now let s use vectors to build our Bore ee O AEE AE Ouct a co onent o a e endicular oa descriptions of more interesting objects mtm sp a4 Pr a9 al0 ras A ray is half of a line we define it by move al0 a4 Ls ee movi vTemp0 a10 a starting point and a direction callr vProjection stemp projection move al0 a9 Start S Sx Sy Sz move a4 al0 Direction D Dx Dy Dz callr vSub subtract projection to get perpendicular mmfm sp a4 a8 a9 al10 I like to imagine a point starting at S rets and traveling out in direction D see wioriaiieas Figure 5 The position of this traveling Out a9 normalized a8 point at time t is given by SEA m r a9 al0 move a9 a move a8 a9 P S t D callr vDot a8 a8 square of size calla fxSqRoot size to a0 where move
253. rademark of International Business Machines Corporation Ventura Publisher is a trademark of Univation Inc Harvard Publisher is a trademark of Softward Publishing Corporation Reader Service Number 26 44 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 sociated with each of the messages is 1 8 From this point of view we can say that the uncertainty resolved by each message is log 1 probability of the mes sage This viewpoint allows us to extend the theory to a case where the messages are not equally possible Unlikely Messages Let s consider a case with two alterna tives A which has a probability of 4 5 and B which has a probability of 1 5 We can say that the uncertainty resolved by receipt of alternative A is log 1 4 5 log 5 4 322 s bits and the uncertainty resolved by receipt of alternative B is similar log 1 1 5 log 5 2 322 s bits We could also say that in a long series of messages on the average A would be received 4 5 of the time and B 1 5 of the time So the average un certainty resolved by messages from this set of two messages is a weighted average 4 5 0 322 1 5 2 322 0 722 s_bits Now this brings up some interesting issues What does it mean to say that the uncertainty is less than 1 s_bit both in the case of the message with probability 4 5 and for the weighted average Let s first look at the uncertainty as sociated with alter
254. ram can be directly imple mented in a computer in the form of an interpreter or in a decidable relation Compile p q which holds whenever the object program q is obtained from the source program p by a process called compilation 22 MICROCORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 The computer interprets the object program q in a way specified by the rela tion Eval1 This behavior can be captured in terms of source programs by the relation Eval which we can define as Eval p i o holds if and only if we have Compile p q and Evall q i 0 for the ob ject program q Classical Procedural Programs Now I ll formally describe a simple procedural language called L which con tains assignment if and while state ments Figure 1 shows the syntax of the language L in the so called Backus nor mal form We re not building a parser for L here so we can ignore the fact that our gram mar is ambiguous We ve also omitted the obvious definitions of variables and numbers Consider the simple program L in Figure 2 Figure 3 gives the result of trac ing the execution of the program with input To trace the execution of the program is simple enough but it s much harder to deduce that the program computes the value x n into the variable y provided n gt 0 The underlying algorithm is called a logarithmic exponentiation and is the fastest way of computing integer powers The relation Eval see Figure 4 specifies the formal s
255. rd Keyboard Connector e Slicer s Own Bios Source Code Included e Ideal For Tough Industrial OEM and Portable Applications e American Made and Fully Supported by Slicer e Complete SLY40 XT System with 20 MEG Hard Disk Just 1299 95 Retail e Without Hard Disk Just 995 95 Retail Ask About Our Complete Line of Computer Products and Accessories MasterCard Visa Check Money Order or C O D Allow four weeks for delivery Prices subject to change without notice NOTE NEW ADDRESS amp PHONE NO Slicer Computers Inc 3450 Snelling Ave So Minneapolis MN 55406 612 724 2710 Telex 501357 SLICER UD PC and XT Are Trademarks of International Business Machines Reader Service Number 19 78 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 The scanner works fine but the software which comes with it stinks I ve called Microtek over a dozen times Each time they ve told me they d send something that would help only once did I receive anything and it was for the Mac Bugs The Genius display driver doesn t work The software can t generate a usable paintbrush PCX file Saving the whole scanned image in Eyestar format its native mode occasionally destroys the hard drive s FAT Changing the scan resolution or size often causes an illegal size error message It doesn t matter what you do after that the program won t work And the manual is so opaque that it took me almost two weeks to generate m
256. rd is so well built it carries a full 2 year warranty which is probably a i lot longer than your PC s warranty But just in case you are not completely satisfied you can always change your mind ee with our no questions asked 30 day money back ge _ guarantee ee Da Heres What the Experts Think ed 661 really prefer the feel of the Data Desk Turbo 101 The keys have tactile feedback No mush at all Jerry Pournelle Byte Magazine August 1987 99 66 Don t plop down your simoleons for a Keytronic or others for ingenuity of design and sheer dollar value those from DataDesk can t be beat Curt Suplee Washington Post May 1987 99 Models also available for the Tandy 1000 AT amp T PCjr and all Macintosh computers Limited offer with purchase of Turbo 101 enhanced keyboard All DataDesk International products are registered trademarks or trademarks of DataDesk international Inc Other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders Copyright 1987 DataDesk International Reader Service Number 8 Please add 10 ship S ping and handling CAU EN residents must also z include 9 75 sales tax foreach keyboard Company n Street Address EASE ECO A Computer Type o Credit ae Exp 66 Great typing touch there s only one DataDesk Turbo 101 the first keyboard to challenge IBM products seriously Jim Sey
257. re two methods for com municating serially synchronous and asynchronous In synchronous communication see Controlling Synchronous Serial Chips Figure 1 RS 232 Data IDLE STATE START BIT With A Parallel Port in Micro C 39 there are two signals data and clock Be cause of the clock which tells the receiv ing end when the next bit is valid there s no need to pause between bytes to reset both the sender and receiver Thus there are no stop or start bits In asynchronous communication by far the most common mode only the data is sent First both ends have to agree on how fast the data is sent the baud rate Then there s a pause between characters the start bit at the beginning of the character and 1 1 5 or 2 stop bits at the end By keeping track of the start and stop bits and by knowing how fast data is being sent the receiver knows when to look for each of the 8 or 7 data bits that come between Figure 1 shows how a byte is trans ferred The ones and zeros are logical they don t reflect the voltage values on the RS 232 lines more about that later When quiet the line is in a marking con dition it s marking time The first edge of the signal transition from mark to space notifies the receiver that a new OPTIONAL PARITY BIT STOP BITS DATA BITS one See Ee ees cee Pa eee pe eee SPACE ___ gt byte is beginning To insure it wasn t just a
258. resenting the two alternatives is just 1 since we can say that 0 stands for alterna tive one and 1 for alternative two We could be wasteful and use longer strings and say 00000 stands for the first alterna tive and 11111 for the second and so on but we re thinking of the most economi cal way of distinguishing between the al ternatives When data is represented in a computer s memory using 0 s and 1 s the on off switches which we use to rep resent the information are usually described as holding one bit of infor mation each So we can say that the un certainty or information content of a mes sage selected from N alternatives is log N bits However we should keep in mind that when we talk bits here we re think ing of the least number of bits necessary to represent the alternatives To em phasize this I ll use the word s_bits for Shannon bits when referring to the measure of uncertainty This will distin guish it from the bits used for holding the information in a computer The simplest case is 2 alternatives which we can associate with the uncer tainty of log 2 1 s_bit of information Shannon used the name entropy to refer to the amount of uncertainty in an outcome since the logarithmic formula he developed was very similar to one which had been used in the field of ther modynamics The thermodynamics for mula was used to measure a similar situation where there were a large num ber of
259. ristensen s XMODEM XMODEM divides a file into packets containing 1 the SOH Start Of Header character an ASCII 01 to indi cate the beginning of a packet 2 the se quence number of the packet both nor mal and in one s complement 3 128 bytes of file data and 4 one byte of checksum or the checkvalue which is calculated by simply adding all the data bytes together as they come in throwing away the carries Although by no means perfect XMODEM is probably the most com monly used protocol An early flaw a checksum can miss errors has been rec tified with the addition of a cyclic redun dancy check CRC for the checkvalue CRCs are more complicated but much more reliable But you must often specify XMODEM checksum or XMODEM CRC The stand alone XMODEM program only transfers one file at a time This was improved in the MODEM7 program which will move groups of files MODEM 7 usually generates either check sum or CRC automatically The YMODEM transfer has its own protocol but will use XMODEM if that s what the other end is using ZMODEM WXMODEM and others keep popping up Usually what s best is whatever the other machine uses I ve looked at a number of public domain shareware communications programs and I think my favorite is Shareware s Procomm it s mature it seems bug free it supports most popular file transfer protocols it emulates a VT100 terminal convenient for connect ing to minis and
260. rite code like this requires a good un derstanding of the language He points at the common I O func tions defined as part of many lan guages but implemented as functions in C He says this is a defect of C I see it as an advantage The code isn t linked in unless necessary and I don t use it very much in a large system where I m likely to use my own I O library Mr Isaacson points to the terse na ture of this small elegant language as a fault saying that cryptic incom prehensible code becomes easy to write and that K amp R give some ex amples with a tone of approval of atrocious C programming technique Is C more cryptic than assembly Is it difficult to write atrocious assemb ly code Is K amp R the Devil s program ming guide Well isn t that special I think Mr Isaacson is not a C literate programmer In his summary he states that lack of a debugger short symbol names and inefficient code make C a poor choice for large efforts I use Microsoft C with CodeView a fine debugger MSC sports 31 character symbol names and an excellent optimizer with automatic register allocation loop optimization intrinsic code for more common functions such as strlen as well as the more common optimizations that Mr Isaacson finds so trivial Well written assembly code can be more efficient and certainly more fun to write But portability availability of maintenance talent and client para
261. rled wisp of a man approached Could you use a hand Great I shouted against the gale wondering if he could really help But together we moved it Then as he held the quivering frame I jumped in and cranked up the Franklin As the ancient bird and I rose from the runway I spotted the old man standing alone by the fence the damp coastal wind whipping at his thin clothes I waved the Stinson dipped a wing and we were gone I think he would have liked a ride Metal prop or not Continued on page 77 Interlocking Pieces Blaise amd turbo Pascal Whether you re a Turbo Pascal expert or a novice you can benefit from using professional tools z mee A to enhance your programs With Turbo POWER TOOLS PLUS and Turbo ASYNCH PLUS Se oe j OIER SCREEN em 3129 00 s Blaise Computing offers you all the right pieces to solve your 4 0 development puzzle s screens block mode data entry or field by Compiled units TPU files are provided so each package is ready touse lt field control witlrinstant screen access Now ae fc Ci ne BASI x with Turbo Pascal 4 0 Both POWER TOOLS PLUS and ASYNCHPLUS lt fOr Turbo Pascal 4 0 soon for C and BASIC BS use units in a clear consistent and effective way If you are familiar vie Turbo C TOOLS 129 00 with units you will appreciate the organization If you are just getting Full spectrum of a s rvic
262. rsion 1 3 of Newlin s Arcmaster answers the novice archivist s prayers for a respite from the downpour Arcmaster embraces Phil Katz s and Vernon Buerg s speedy archive utilities As Newlin points out in his documenta tion Arcmaster provides the menu driven ability to e View an ARC file directory list ing at the touch of a key e DeARC multiple files e Selectively extract or delete files from an ARC file e Search any or all drives in your system for a file that resides in an ARC file e Browse ARCed files using Vern Buerg s outstanding LIST program It s amusing to see that Newlin is_like me in thinking that outstanding always precedes 60 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 CP M and TURBO Pascal are trademarks of Digital Research amp Borland Int LIST TB e Quickly and easily select ARC or DeARC switches and options e Specify a target directory for file extraction Specify a target directory as host for created ARC files e Swiftly search entire system for any file e View any file through Buerg s LIST program In brief Newlin has taken PKARC and PKXARC by Phil Katz ARCA and ARCE by Vernon Buerg and Buerg s LIST utility and combined them so you can view combine extract and delete archive files User friendliness has come to the archiving business As shareware programs grow in size and complexity more software libraries and bulletin boards are u
263. s MB86 breaks CB86 file size and record number limits and enables network support MB86 enhan ces the Cbasic language with new features as well as fixing many old CB86 problems Versions of MB86 are available for Microsoft C Turbo C Aztec C and Microport Unix Call orwrite for more information We also carry a complete line of enhancements for CB86 and Pascal MT Minnow Bear Computers P O Box 2233 Station A Champaign IL 61820 8233 217 344 1113 Reader Service Number 83 OPT TECH SORT MERGE Extremely fast Sort Merge Select utility Run as an MS DOS command or CALL as a subroutine Supports most lan guages and filetypes including Btrieve and dBase Unlimited filesizes multiple keys and much more MS DOS 149 XENIX 249 702 588 3737 Opt Tech Data Processing P O Box 678 Zephyr Cove NV 89448 Reader Service Number 64 CROSS ASSEMBLERS PseudoCode releases version 2 of its cross assemblers Assemblers for the 8048 8051 8096 8085 Z80 6502 1802 6800 6805 6809 68000 and 32000 microprocessor families are available Macros Conditional Assembly Include Files plus extensive expression hand ling Virtually no limit to program size For IBM PC s and true compatibles with MS DOS 2 0 or greater and 256K memory Complete with printed manual for 35 00 Each additional is 20 00 Michigan residents add 4 tax Visa MC Order from distributor Micro KIt 6910 P
264. s pag Low Cost EPROM Eraser Inside The PC Controlling Stepper Motors 96 pages Smart Video Controller 104 pages From Your P ISSUE 16 2 84 Review MicroSphere RAM Disk Introduction To Fractals Xerox 820 Column Restarts Future Tense Begins IS The Secrets Of MS DOS From ISSUE 38 11 87 BBI Double Density 86 pages SUE 29 4 86 Boots To Devide Drivers Parallel Processing BBII 5 8 Interface Fix Speeding Up Your XT y Poking About In The System Laser Printers Typesetters Kaypro ZCPR Patch Importing Systems From Taiwan With Turbo Pascal And Page Definition Languages Adding Joystick To Color Graphic ISSUE 24 6 85 Prototyping In C 96 pages Magic in the Real World Recovering Text From Memory C ing Into Turbo Pascal C Interpreters Reviewed Build a Graphics Scanner 52 pages 8 Drives On the Kaypro Benchmarking The PCs for 6 00 Part 2 48 Lincs On a BBI 104 pages ISSUE 34 2 87 Writing a resident program i cet Versus ee i a igning win Reo extractor in C ISSUE 17 4 84 oldering The First Steps ui imple Oscilloscope 96 pages Voice S kpa 88 pages j ISSUE 30 6 86 A Cheap 68000 Operating System pag 820 RAM Disk PROLOG On The PC A concurrent Operating System Kaypro Morse Code Interface Expert Systems _ Recovering Directories And FATs ISSUE 39 1 88 68000 Based System Review ISSUE 25 8 85 ropie Programming 96 pages PC Graphics Inside CP M 86 Why I Wrote A Debugger Building Your Own Logic Analyzer SOLD OUT Drawing the Mandelgrot and 56 pages The
265. s and rhetoric are stripped away most debates on whether or not Al is possible come down to a standoff between the reduc tionists and the holists those who believe that mind can be explained as the sum of its parts and those who believe that in any such explanation something will always elude analysis Intuition eludes analysis It can t be ex plained at low levels in the firing of neurons and the like or at high levels in rules and facts Douglas Hofstadter believing that it s 96 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 neither necessary to model neurons nor pos sible to capture the top level of the mind sug gests a middle level where rules emerge On this level where we solve anagrams and the like we aren t intentionally systematic According to Hofstadter When you first read a Jumble in a newspaper you play around rearranging regrouping reshuffling in complex ways that you have no control over In fact it feels as if you throw the letters up into the air separately and when they come down they have somehow magically glommed together in some English like word It s a mar velous feeling and it s anything but cognitive anything but conscious As a test of Micro C s intelligence I sent Larry Fogg Raphael Robinson s puzzle He likes puzzles and I had high hopes Just fill in the blanks I said In this sentence the number of occurrences of 0 is__ oflis_ of2is_ of3is_ of4is__ of 5
266. s pos sess the expected states for several time units in phase The process will alternate between the and phases until the network has found the global minimum For those hardy souls who are inter ested the Appendix pp 315 317 at the end of Chapter 7 in Rumelhart et al 1986 actually derives the learning rule for the Boltzmann Machine Some interesting questions can be in vestigated in programming a Boltzmann Machine 1 What should the temperature be at which annealing begins 2 How gradually is the temperature to be reduced 3 What should the temperature Netwurkz models a neural net in a tutorial level program with source you can change It demonstrates an associative memory finding nearest match to input word Limit of 1000 neurons max Netwurkz includes a complete copy of PL D the compiler language it is written in PL D is easy to learn offers control not in C and is faster Netwurkz 79 95 Neural Net emulator with source PL D compiler and printed manuals Add 75 for source of PL D PC XT AT compatible with 256K BAIR ee Systems 3440 Kenneth Drive Palo Alto CA 94303 415 494 7081 Reader Service Number 90 20 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 equilibrium temperature be at which annealing is terminated 4 Can the annealing schedule be modified after each learning cycle Potential Applications Like a new wonder drug neural nets have been suggeste
267. s with output pat terns Then when we present an input pattern to the system in the testing mode MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 17 Unbelievable Creates commented source code and listings from memory COM or EXE files e CLARIFY UNDOCUMENTED CODE e EASILY MODIFY PROGRAMS SOURCER creates detailed com mented listings and source code di rectly suitable for assembly Built in data analyzer and simulator resolves mul tiple data segments and provides detailed comments on interrupts and subfunctions I O ports and much more Determines all necessary assembler directives Complete support for 8088 through 80286 V20 V30 8087 and 80287 instruction sets No other prod uct comes close to the output quality of SOURCER PS 2 AT XT PC Clones e CHANGE amp ADD FEATURES e CLARIFIES BIOS INTERFACES o SPECIFIC TO YOUR MACHINE The bios pre processor to SOURCER provides the first means to obtain ac curate legal source listings for any bios Identifies entry points with full explana tions Resolves PS 2 s multiple jumps for improved clarity Provides highly de scriptive data labels such as video_ mode and keybd_q_head and much more Fully automatic SOURCER SOURCER w BIOS Pre Processor 139 95 OUTSIDE USA ADD 15 SHIPPING CA RES ADD SALES TAX All our products come with a 30 day money back satisfaction guarantee Not copy protected To order or receive additional information just cal
268. sed video products ordered within 1 week of SOG ec Special pricing effective July 7 21 1988 904 N 6th St PC XT AT DGIS Hercules and Windows 2 0 are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies Lake City MN 55041 612 345 4555 612 345 5514 FAX Reader Service Number 3 awn positions Switch selectable for swapping Ctrl and Caps Lock Extra wide Shift keys You don t have to think twice Get both the best selling Turbo Positive tactile Two conral firm feel keys ond Alt keys 12 function keys with functional F11 amp F12 Enlarged L shaped Enter Key Screen key Dedicated screen control and cursor movement keys Dedicated numeric keypad with enlarged Enter key Dedicated Pause Scroll Lock Print s Its A No Ihinker DataDesk s New Turbo 101 Enhanced Keyboard Bundle Dedicated Cops Num Scroll tock Enhanced Keyboard and ThinkTank the award winning outline processor Now Both You and Your PC can be State of the Art The Turbo 101 Enhanced Keyboard gives you all of the features of IBM s newest key board standard see above photo It s ideal for word processing with its traditional Selectric typewriter layout featuring enlarged Shift Enter and Control keys Spreadsheet entry couldn t be easier be cause we give you both a separate Cursor and Numeric keypad eliminating the
269. sh packaging design approach has been taken using modular construction At present over 40 optional stock modules allow you to customize our standard chassis to nearly any requirement Integrand offers high quality advanced design hardware along with applications and technical support all at prices competitive with imports Why settle for less Rack amp Desk PC AT Chassis Rack amp Desk Models Accepts PC XT AT Motherboards and Passive Backplanes Doesn t Look Like IBM Rugged Modular Construction Excellent Air Flow amp Cooling Optional Card Cage Fan Designed to meet FCC 204 Watt Supply UL Recognized 145W amp 85W also available Reasonably Priced Reader Service Number 22 Call or write for descriptive brochure and prices 8620 Roosevelt Ave Visalia CA 93291 209 651 1203 TELEX 5106012830 INTEGRAND UD EZLINK 62926572 We accept BankAmericard VISA and MasterCard IBM PC XT AT trademarks of International Business Machines Drives and computer boards not included MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 87 SOG VII July 14 July 16 THURSDAY RAFTING We start SOG VII off by offering two trips down the Deschutes River You can choose between A 2 1 2 hour raft trip with 3 miles of class I III rapids Your price of 32 per person includes the Old Fashioned Barbe que Check in at the Pinckney Center registration table before 11 a m Thursday for raft scheduling OR An all day e
270. sing ARCing programs to combine and compress their files New members of users groups raid the software library and come away with archives that may at first seem impenetrable Arcmaster goes a long way towards solving that problem Teach someone you love to use Arcmaster and archiving worries are forever banished Reader Service Number 31 The registration fee for Arcmaster is a modest 40 but you can save yourself 10 if you include the user s question naire that Newlin provides at the end of the manual He s serious about getting feedback and Newlin is making it worth your while to share your reac tions with him But Wait There s More In addition Newlin provides registered users with a copy of Arcmaster Plus We really must find an alternative soon to the overworked plus suffix don t you agree The Plus version includes extra fea tures like batch processing of file moves deletions or copying printing archive directories renaming files as signment of function keys to filename masks date time sorting aliases for ARCA ARCE PKARC and PKXARC and DOS wild cards for archive opera tions Arcmaster Plus is restricted to registered users and cannot be other wise distributed For more information pick up a copy of Arcmaster from your favorite local source or contact ZRP M is an operating system combined with a Z280 emula tor Either standalone or with DOS present ZRP M provides the solid
271. smit and receive lines pins 2 and 3 Tx and Rx a logical zero Figure 2 RS 232 Pinout DB 25 14 15 16 17 18 SIGNAL NAME EARTH GROUND TRANSMITTED DATA Tx RECEIVED DATA Rx REQUEST TO SEND CLEAR TO SEND DATA SET READY LOGIC GROUND CARRIER DETECT RESERVED RESERVED UNASSIGNED SECONDARY CARRIER DETECT SECONDARY CLEAR TO SEND RS 232 Pinout DB 9 SIGNAL NAME CARRIER DETECT RECEIVED DATA TRANSMITTED DATA DATA TERMINAL READY SIGNAL GROUND 19 20 21 By Bruce Eckel Eisys Consulting 1009 N 36th Street Seattle WA 98103 is represented by a signal between 5 and 15 Volts a logical one is repre sented by a signal between 5 and 15 volts As you might guess there is also an RS 232B It uses voltages between 25 and 25V It s worth noting that the standard RS 232 driver chip 1488 and receiver chip 10 11 12 13 e o o o o 22 23 24 25 SIGNAL NAME SECONDARY TRANSMITTED DATA TRANSMIT CLOCK SECONDARY RECEIVED DATA RECEIVER CLOCK UNASSIGNED SECONDARY REQUEST TO SEND DATA TERMINAL READY SIGNAL QUALITY DETECT RING DETECT DATA RATE SELECT TRANSMIT CLOCK UNASSIGNED SIGNAL NAME DATA SET READY REQUEST TO SEND CLEAR TO SEND RING INDICATE MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 31 Figure 3 Connecting Devices using RS 232 COMPUTER DTE THE TRANSMITTED SIGNAL AT THIS END BECOMES THE RECEIVED SIGNAL AT THIS END MODULATOR DEMODULATOR DCE MODULA
272. sor doesn t access RAM during a LOCK Maybe it makes up its own data during a LOCK Maybe LOCK doesn t work and no one realizes it Maybe the XT doesn t work Maybe I should go back to writing captions for the culture corner P S Dean Klein straightened us out I guess that s what deans are for Fixing Our Credibility I received a note from Darrell Bethune of West Vancouver British Columbia It was the first time someone had managed book length prose on a single renewal form One of Darrell s points Keep editorial integrity Zortech and Trilogy plugs in the same issue as their first ads You re right Darrell that s suspicious However both companies earned their plugs from the editors And they earned them long before they decided to ad vertise See last issue s On Your Own column for my thoughts on advertising when you re getting editorial mention I think they were smart And I reserve the right to say what I think about a product whether or not the company advertises For instance I ve received three products which print out information on Ventura style sheets or chapters Two are standard commercial products one is shareware All have bugs Many of the bugs are significant The best and only really workable package is called Withstyle It s distributed by Pecan Software Systems and it lets you print out tag information as well as transfer tags from one style sheet to another hoora
273. switch state ments are a problem while others aren t The problem only occurs in the small and medium models when the Oa or Ox switches are used Microsoft is working on a new 5 1 release of MSC It will have an editor a new linker and will work with both MS DOS and OS 2 It will be possible to create dynamically linkable libraries with the new version All known bugs will be fixed Also coming from Microsoft are new versions of Macro Assembler MASM Pascal Fortran and a business BASIC compiler All of these new compilers will work with both MS DOS and OS 2 A new OS 2 Software Developer s Kit with a 350 price tag will also be announced My arm is getting sore filling out update forms Speaking Of OS 2 Lattice will soon be releasing a new version of their C compiler which will support OS 2 development The new compiler will run under both MS DOS and OS 2 A global optimizer and a symbolic debugger will be included Datalight Optimum C The folks at Datalight are up to version 3 14 now it seems almost as though they re running the version of the month club I appreciate Walter Bright s the author of Datalight C at titude if there s a bug he wants the users to get the fix as soon as possible Although this means the compiler constantly changes it also means a better and better compiler Datalight has a subscription BBS for 60 per year where you can get the absolutely latest version of the compiler at
274. t Brief you klutz Maybe Brief does automatically recog nize my 34010 Mono s full screen mode And its macro language can integrate it with just about any compiler that spits out error messages Earl uses Brief every day and thinks it s ludefisk soup hey this is Minnesota But Brief only has tiled windows Yuck Overlapped is where it s at and besides it s too expen sive for my blood What else is there Vedit Nah I still have bad memories of old Vedit that have held over to my impression of new Vedit It uses tiled windows anyway And it s expensive too What about Express Much as I hate to give up such a faithful friend the times have changed and neither Cecil nor I have had the chance to change Ex press with them It may be fast and it does configure right up for a 64 line screen with no hiccups or growls but it ll only edit a single file at a time And lately I m just too schizophrenic to cope with that The Solution I haven t found the solution to this dilemma yet but I do have a good can didate It s an editor called Point from Logitech If any of you own Logitech Modula version 3 0 or a recent Logitech Mouse you already own Point it s in cluded with the Plus software pack age that comes with most of their mice as well as with Modula As far as I know they don t sell it separately but even if you buy the mouse or Modula just to get Point you re still spending less
275. t C is far easier to maintain So use whatever language is appropriate for the task at hand Assembly language certainly has its place so does C And perhaps there s even a good use for COBOL Martin Nohr 4152 Rosenbaum Ave San Jose CA 95136 Editor s note If nothing else Isaacson s article generated a flood of great letters I haven t seen so much good natured dis agreement since a state department official suggested statehood for South Africa Fractal Error Thanks for the free sample issue 39 which did indeed have a bunch of worthwhile stuff I might even sub scribe Larry Fogg s article on the Man delbrot and Julia sets was useful not because of still another bubbly descrip tion of the unquestioned beauty of the sets but because of the simple core programs which tempt one to play The programs probably would have been slightly more useful if they had not had a trivial mathematical error If you want to find the intercolumn spac ing for columns ranging from zero to maxcol you divide the range by max col not maxcol 1 Oh what a familiar error He did it for rows and columns in both programs and is not the first Hal Lewis Dept of Physics University of California Santa Barbara CA 93106 Editor s note Thanks for the correction Hal A number of readers have sent in their fractal code also They used 8087 assembly fixed point math and more efficient algo rithms Look for an article i
276. t even know Soon updates were no longer a matter of dropping a disk onto a colleague s desk he was laying out cash for mailers and postage Inspiration struck User Supported Software Is Born I began including a message asking for a 10 contribution from people who were really serious about getting updates he said Button put it quite simply His hobby had to become self supporting or he would have to discon tinue mailing out disks Button s wife calmly informed him that he was crazy if he thought anyone would send him money Almost immediately he discovered that someone else had had the same idea A friend came back to Button with a disk bearing a program by Andrew Fluegelman called PC Talk Said Button s acquaintance Fluegelman is doing the same thing you re doing but it looks like he s doing it a lot more professional ly Audiences laugh when Button tells this story on himself but it was a turning point in shareware s history Fluegelman s experiment in economics was called Freeware a term he trademarked Button was calling it user sup ported software and Quicksoft s Bob Wallace later coined shareware He packaged his disk with a nicely written pitch for people to participate in this alternative marketing scheme Now you could try before you buy ButtonWare s First Price Hike Button sent Fluegelman a copy of his database program and the two were soon
277. ted disk that s without verification FastCopy on the other hand did the following With verify off it copied the data onto a formatted disk in 12 seconds and onto an unformatted disk in 38 seconds With verify on it took 24 seconds to a formatted disk and 50 seconds to an unfor matted disk And remember your system doesn t have to reread the master each time it makes a copy And I still haven t mentioned the online help the fancy menus all the information the program tells you about the source and destination disks and so forth Fantastic package Jim you did a great job with FastCopy and I wish you all the best _ FastCopy 3 0 69 95 Systems Software Support P O Box 751022 Houston TX 77275 1022 713 941 3100 Larry s 8088 Piece This last PC LSI piece from Larry has been one of the most difficult The 8088 is a complex chip no doubt about it but we both expected it to be well documented It is and it isn t The way it s used in the PC XT threw us both a curve Especially when it came to the LOCK pin The LOCK pin sup posedly goes low true when you run a LOCK instruction A LOCK instruction tells the processor that on the next instruc tion it gets RAM all to itself no one else gets access to RAM during that instruction We couldn t figure how the 8088 could access RAM after it had locked out everyone else We tried figuring signals logically then illogically Neither worked Maybe the proces
278. tely many bad choices Apologies to those of you still slowly cranking out blank screens Figure 2 shows the parameters Gregory sent plus a few from The Beauty of Fractals Remem ber any region near the boundary of the Mandelbrot set will produce interesting results Also a full 1000 iterations doesn t add much resolution so stick to 500 or less Seagate Step Rates The Seagate ST4000 series full height linear voice coil drives have an unusually narrow step MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 85 Eco C88 lt C Compiler with Cmore Debugger Professionals prefer the E 0 C88 compiler for ease of use and its pow _ ful debugging features Our picky flag gives you nine levels 7 lint like T m very impressed with the com piler editor and debugger I ve tried quite a few different compilers for the PC and have given up on all of the others in favor of yours I ve gotten to the point where I download C code from a DEC VAX VMS system just to be able to compile it with the picky flag set at 9 It finds lots of things VMS totally ignores JS Oak Ridge TN The ek Eco C88 complet includes A full featured C compiler with A mem ory models up to 1 meg of code and ta plus most ANSI enhancements Without a doubt the best error check ing you can get We catch bues the dard library with over 230 fluff functions many of which are System V and ANSI compat ible Full source A
279. ter What we ve been talking about is a model a simplified biological model wherein the brain is a system of many in teracting parts whose overall state evol ves or changes continuously The way it evolves depends on the connections be tween neurons Not all neurons affect all other neurons and not all neurons which affect each other do so equally Based on this model work began in the 40 s and 50 s to model computing devices around the neural network theories That work stalled in the mid Figure 1 Small Neural Network amp Neuron A SINGLE STYLIZED NEURON NETj t 60 s because of hardware and software limitations Computers simply weren t powerful enough to test the neural network theories And AI gurus Minsky and Papert were attacking the theories Then in 1982 John Hopfield showed that important problems could indeed be solved by neural networks This led to a revival in neural network research and in the last three years there s been an ex plosion of academic and commercial in terest Many companies are now funding attempts to create neural networks in hardware as well as software In this article we ll briefly describe how a neural network works then go into the details of two useful models Neural Networks Neural networks are self organizing systems of simple interconnected processing units See Figure 1 _ One way to look at these units is to consider each as a repr
280. than to buy just Brief or just Vedit And you get a great little mouse or one of the most complete Modula development systems around too And Point has OVER LAPPED WINDOWS Hubba Hubba Like I said though it s just a can didate It has a few drawbacks So far I can only make it go up to 43 lines the PC Tech 34010 Mono can easily be made to recognize many programs 43 line EGA mode while keeping its normal 9 x 14 character font Then there s the problem that Point MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 55 uses the mouse heavily That would be okay if the keyboard commands were also full featured but unfortunately they make you simulate the mouse by doing two keypresses for each mouse button If they d just take a good look at Microsoft WORD It may be huge and expensive but the keyboard vs mouse thing is handled very well And I have found a few serious crash causing bugs I can recover by quitting and restarting I m sending a list of these off to Logitech so maybe they ll soon be fixed Otherwise Point is great Extremely fast oh did I forget to mention fast as one of my requirements Silly me multi level undo very configurable It goes one step further than a macro lan guage You can load in complete programs written in a real language Logitech Modula of course which integrate with the editor that s how they integrate it with their Modula compiler and linker Now i
281. the first thing to do is change its name is to replace the second word in each pair in the translation table with a pointer to a longer null terminated translation string Then keep track of where you are in the replacement string during subsequent calls Another way of doing the same thing would be to use that pointer to point to a subroutine to execute instead of just pointing to a string Then you could hook it up to a hotkeyed user interface through INT 9 which would let the user define new keys and save and recall files full of macros Then give it a name like uh QuickKey Yeah That s the ticket Let me get back to you on that one huh 4 o MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 57 Anthony Barcellos P O Box 2249 Davis CA 95617 2249 916 756 4866 ButtonWare Tour 88 Coming Soon To A Users Group Near You In January Tony sat through two presentations by Jim Button Now he s writing about Button Ware Am I surprised Are you Is ButtonWare really interesting Sure im Button was on the road Two major users groups in three days San Francisco on Monday and Sacramento on Wednes day His routine has been honed by many prior appearances but his message hasn t changed He just wanted to say thanks Over the past year Button has descended upon practically every notable users group both at home and abroad He has traveled literally all over the world says DeeDee Walsh Butt
282. the i input unit The total input into any hidden unit and or output unit Uj is Neti t L wji O t Bi j where Wji is the weight of the connection from unit i to unit j and Oj t is the actual output produced by unit j at a time t when a particular input pattern is shown to the net The activation value of any unit is cal culated by the logistic function 1 ai t 1 exp Net t 0 lt ai t lt 1 The output function is simply a threshold function O i t 1 if ai t gt 0 5 1 otherwise The net input into any hidden or out put unit is found from the following equation Neti t Wij t Oj t Bi If the output O t isn t equal to the tar get T t then the difference T t O t propagates through the system according to the following equations during the second phase The error signal amp i t for each of out put signal is determined by di t Tilt O t ai t 1 ai t where T t is i component of the target pattern T t The weight for each connection into output unit i is changed by Wig t i t Oj t where f is the learning rate typically 0 lt f lt 1 The error signal for a middle unit i is found from Si t ai t 1 ar t Bkk Wki t where 6 varies for all output units The weights for all connections into middle unit i are changed by Wiz t i t 04 t Boltzmann Machine The
283. the user Method We ll change INT 16h by writing a Terminate and Stay Resident TSR program that saves the original INT 16h vector and replaces it with our own Then every time there s a request for keyboard input we ll call the original INT 16h to get a key and then translate it into another key according to a lookup table Simple enough I always thought the best way of un derstanding a program was to look at the code which you can find on Micro C s RBBS or get on the Issue 41 disk 6 to subscribers 8 to non subscribers and foreign If you re so inclined check out the code for the listing of TURKKEYS ASM that s Turk Keys not Turkeys After you ve taken a look at the code come back here so I can ex plain a few of the fine points i e weird parts of the code Explanation You may notice some similarities be tween this program and the program in issue 39 which intercepted printer out put on INT 17h the ROM BIOS printer output function That s because they have a lot in common The initialization routine is identical except for the difference in procedure names and interrupt numbers It s the same basic sequence of events to install any TSR You just print a message save a vector install a replacement vector then Terminate and Stay Resident A Few Details The similarities stop there though The service routine we ve installed for the keyboard is translating input not o
284. tible diskette Formats get you down read them all with your PC UniForm PC by MicroSolutions How often have you wished you could use your CP M diskettes on your PC Now you can access your CP M disks and programs on your MS DOS computer just as you would a standard MS DOS diskette Once the UniForm driver is installed you can use standard DOS commands and programs right on your original diskette without modifying or copying your files UniForm PC allows you to read write format and copy diskettes from over 275 CP M and MS DOS computers on your PC XT or AT With UniForm PC and the Compaticard you can use 5 high density 96TPI dual format 342 720k 1 44 meg PS 2 and even 8 drives UniForm PC by MicroSolutions Uniform for Kaypro and other machines CompatiCard by MicroSolutions Meet the CompatiCard THE universal disk drive controller card This half card will let you run up to 16 disk drives 4 per Compati Card on your PC or XT including standard 360K 96 TPI high density 1 2 meg dual speed 8 single or double sided SD or DD and dual format 342 drives 720k 1 44 PS 2 The combi nations are almost unlimited Comes with its own MS DOS driver and format program for high density and 3 2 diskettes Use it with UniForm PC for maximum versitility 8 adaptor and addi tional cabling available CompatiCard Board 169 95 CompatiCard with UniFORM PC x x Special x x 225 00 CompatiCard with UniFORM PC
285. tpaid for U S subscribers 8 each postpaid for non sub scribers and foreign Call 1 800 888 8087 to order MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 59 TURBO C QUICK C LET S C DESMET C DATALIGHT C ECO C LATTICE C MICROSOFT C AZTEC C COMPUTER INNOVATIONS C IS NOTHING SACRED Now the FULL source code for TURBO Pascal is avail able for the IBM PC WHAT you are still trying to debug without source code But why Source Code Generators SCG s provide completely commented and labeled ASCII source files which can be edited and assembled and UNDERSTOOD SCG s are available for the following prod The darndest thing ucts ever did see TURBO Pascal ver 3 IBM PC 67 50 Pournelle BYTE TURBO Pascal ver 3 Z 80 45 00 NEW Limited time offer Peacock System s CBTREE Object library for only 49 Our FULL COMMERCIAL VERSION of CBTREE in object library format is being offered for the amazingly low price of 49 CBTREE provides you with easy to use functions that maintain key indexes on your data records These indexes provide you with fast keyed access using the industry standard B tree access method Everything you need to fully utilize CBTREE in your applications is included The CBTREE source code can be purchased later at any time for the difference Example source programs and utilities are included FREE have seen the original source and yours is mer much better A f
286. ts of state boundaries 1 1 ee ee ee ee 15 The Austin Code Works Voice 512 258 0785 11100 Leafwood Lane acwlhinfoQ uunet uu net BBS 512 258 8831 Austin Texas 78750 8409 USA Reader Service Number 4 FidoNet 1 882 12 Free shipping on prepaid orders For delivery in Texas add 7 MasterCard VISA Reader Service Number 4 Laine Stump PC Tech P O Box 128 Lake City MN 55041 Building A Fancy Keyboard Translator Around Int 16h Indomitable Laine is willing to try anything When he isn t jeeping about in Turkish mountains or rafting virgin rivers he s braving the vicious winters in No it can t be I ve heard of privation but Lake City Think of the culture shock Is there nothing Laine won t at tempt bet you re expecting to hear some story about fighting off wild hippos from a reed canoe while floating down the Blue Nile Or maybe rappelling from 5 000 foot cliffs into neo Shangri La filled with dark skinned pea Well I hate to disappoint you but I ve become suddenly but temporarily a nor mal boring guy I ve been wishing for a snowy winter for three years ever since I left Montana and now I ve got my wish Maybe more than I bargained for I just moved to Minnesota talk about cul ture shock I decided that just reading about these great new 80386s 34010s and all those other 5 digit numbers and all those acronyms too PC MOS OS 2 MTV just wasn t enough So I called
287. uctions to fill up the queue If the current instruc tion requires port or memory I O the BIU finishes up with its prefetch if any and does the I O It then resumes instruc tion prefetching if needed and the EU 36 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 goes back to thinking 8088 8086 Registers Both processors make use of the same 14 two byte registers The four data registers AX BX CX and DX can be ac cessed in two ways as a single 16 bit register AX or as two separate 8 bit registers AH and AL H and L refer to the high and low bytes in the AX register Although you can use most of the registers for several purposes some registers must be used with certain in structions For example port I O requires use of AX for words and AL for bytes The four pointer and index registers can only be accessed as words 16 bits but they have most of the general pur pose capabilities of the data registers While they can be used for math and logic operations they usually serve other purposes The stack pointer SP and base pointer BP support stack functions String functions often use the source index SI and destination index DI for manipulating strings When the 8088 needs to find the next instruction of a program it uses the in struction pointer IP A programmer can t get at the IP directly probably a good thing The flag register holds infor mation on the status of arithmetic and logic
288. ue 21 Dec Jan 1985 Eric Sos man presented a BASIC program to strip the comments from an assembly language file The program works fine However if you are serious about learning to program in C why not write your comment stripper in C Hence NOCMNT C see Figure 1 which does precisely that The algorithm is essentially a straightfor ward translation of Sosman s BASIC into C coupled with part of Kernighan and Ritchie s code for removing trailing white space In order to reproduce Sosman s logic both C s continue and break statements were used However rather than opening and clos ing files I relied on input output redirection which the compiler on K7 supports but Fred Scacchitti s version does not Actually I agree with Fred s viewpoint in that CP M is not UNIX and I would prefer a command line syntax such as A gt nocmnt fatfile asm slimfile asm Instead of A gt nocmnt lt fatfile asm gt slimfile asm However redirection is very convenient when you are developing a program Test input can come from the keyboard and you can immediately see the result on the screen This makes debugging much easier Also sometimes the code to fetch and validate file name arguments can be as complex as the rest of the program If there is no such file do you simply abort or do you give the user a second chance Should you show the user a directory Of which disk For this reason if the progr
289. up Dean and Earl at PC Tech in Lake City and made a deal to come work for them during Istanbul s rainy season I ll be playing with high tech toys for the next few months while I wait for the return of warm weather on the Med and while I stock up on paddles life jackets and CDs of deca dent rockabilly bands Topic Of The Month Topic If you recall from last issue we were talking about keyboard interrupts 9 and 16h I covered number 9 the hardware interrupt not the Beatles song last issue and will deal with interrupt 16h the software service interrupt this time But before I get down to business I might as well get a few things off my mind as well as tell you about the great new stuff I m using these days 54 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 Benchmark Blues They ve done it again I don t know how it happens but every time somebody tries to publish some benchmarks they end up with an inaccuracy somewhere Take for example the running saga in Tidbits of the Standard Deviation function which mysteriously runs faster in Prolog than it does in C Well I have no idea why whether or how that might be but when I saw the row in the benchmark spreadsheet showing a 10 Mhz 286 running approximately 7 times faster than an 8 Mhz 186 I simply had to investigate Since I m now working in a shop full of 186 based machines X16Bs and since the machine at my desk is a 10 Mhz 0 wait 286 on a card
290. urbo Pascal the compiler puts the infor mation into the TPU file linkable object and the linker can generate a TPM or special map file Borland provides a utility to convert TPM files into standard MAP files Only information about global variables and procedures is nor mally included in these files Local variables and nested procedures are only visible within their own block and therefore need only be known to the compiler not the linker For Pascal and Modula 2 local variables only exist during the execution of the proce dure that contains them When the procedure is invoked storage for the variables is allocated on the stack and then released on return from the procedure Obviously a debugger has a problem providing sym bolic access to local variables Tdebug In order to allow symbolic access to local variables and nested procedures Turbo Power includes a program that patches both of the Turbo Pascal com pilers so that local symbol information goes into their output The resulting files are fully compatible with those produced by the normal compilers but can be double the normal size After installing the debugger and compiling your program with the proper switches to provide debug infor mation T D you are ready for the chase Invoke the debugger with the command line TDEBUG OPTIONS PROGNAME PARAMETERS Tdebug will load then load your program read the source and TPM files
291. utput So instead of translating and then chaining to the original service routine we must chain first then trans late Because we have to get control back after the ROM BIOS has its say we can t simply jump to the original we must call it But the routine we are call ing returns with an IRET instruction which expects three items on the stack offset segment flags while a far call instruction only puts two items on the stack offset segment What to do There are a couple of possible solu tions The most obvious is to do an INT instruction instead of a CALL After all it puts everything we need onto the stack just perfect for an IRET That s peachy dear but we ve just taken the routine we want to call out of the interrupt table and stored it in a pointer variable So install it some where else in the vector table Well maybe but then what happens if 367 programs all decide to chain onto INT 16h What if there aren t any free vec tors when our program runs I ve adopted a much more trouble free method of chaining interrupts I just push the flags then do an indirect far call through the pointer that stores the address of the original routine That s why I have all those PUSHF in structions without the corresponding POPFs The IRET instruction in the called routine takes care of POPping the Fs Ulse INT 16h if your purpose is to translate keystrokes into other keystrokes If you want t
292. ws With Source Seasoned reliable library leader of the pack CTREE Ver 4 1 RTREE Ver 1 1 CTREE RTREE Package One of the fastest B trees handles networks BTRIEVE Ver 4 1 179 XTRIEVE Ver 3 02 179 XTRIEVE report option Ver 3 02 99 Innovative performer fault tolerant B tree dbVISTA with Source Ver 2 21 dbQUERY with Source Ver 1 0 Very fast portable B tree SQL query option 389 389 NORTON GUIDE C Ver 1 0 69 NORTON GUIDE C ASM Twin Pack Ver 1 0 110 Online help and reference when you need it THE BEST QUALITY C PRODUCTS AT THE BEST PRICES ORDER TOLL FREE The stored interrupt vectors can be handy too These are used by MS DOS to restore the previous vectors upon program termination in case the program changes them When capturing one of these inter rupts in a memory resident program you need to change the associated vec tors in the PSP to point to your Inter rupt Service Routines ISRs Do this before executing the Terminate and Stay Resident TSR function Otherwise DOS will restore the original vectors and any ISRs you may have installed will no longer be attached File Handle Table The file handle table once again un documented by Microsoft explains some things about MS DOS file han dling When using the UNIX like I O functions which appeared with MS DOS 2 files are referenced by a one byte handle DOS uses this number as an index into the table stored in th
293. xecutes Execute any program from within your program and POWER TOOLS PLUS automatically PASCAL TOOLS T 0 OLS2 2 175 00 compresses your heap memory if necessary Youcanevenforce 47 Expanded string and screen handling graph the output of the program into a window eles routings memory management general Write general interrupt service routines for either hardware or software interrupts Blaise Computing s unique intervention code lets you develop memory resident TSRs applications Super batch ae erase Cr te Paich file that take full advantage of DOS capabilities With simple pro iin can invoke programs and pravide input cedure calls schedule a Turbo Pascal procedure to execute i either when pressing a hot key or at a specified time OASYNCH PLUS provides the crucial core of hardware interrupts needed to support asynchronous data communications This package offers simultaneous buffered input and output to both COM ports and up to four EXECU ports on PS 2 systems Speeds to 19 2K baud XON XOFF protocol hard te sa one ated co anotlier n ware handshaking XMODEM with CRC file transfer and modem control ifferent languages specify common data are all supported ASYNCH PLUS provides text file device drivers so you can use standard Readln and Writeln calls and still exploit interrupt driven communication The underlying functions of ASYNCH PLUS are carefully crafted in assembler
294. xpanding technology Prices starting at only 39 95 Call or write the manufacturer direct for FREE product information package e COVOX INC 675 D Conger Street Eugene OR 97402 503 342 1271 Reader Service Number 67 FUTURE86 THE LANGUAGE Variable level extensible rommable lan guage gives complete control Including 80186 88 Simple syntax Easy program ming Compact code Easily optimized for speed or size Interactive debugging facili ties Library source available Investigative FUTURE86 world classs Used in thou sands of applications Prices start at 349 Development Associates 1520 S Lyon Santa Ana CA 92705 714 835 9512 TurboGeometry Library Source amp Manual Turbo Pascal 4 0 C Mac amp Microsoft C Over 150 2 amp 3 dimensional routines including Intersections Transforma tions Equations Hidden Lines Per spective Curves Areas Volumes Clip ping Planes Matrices Vectors Distance Poly Decomp IBM PC amp Comp Mac 99 95 S amp H Visa MC AE DISK SOFTWARE INC 2116 E Arapaho No 487 Richardson TX 75081 214 423 7288 Reader Service Number 80 DEVELOPERS NOW AVAILABLE Sof Tel Inc in their goal to provide innovative Software Solutions now has ready for you two new IBM PC software packages Do you need Modem dialing and interrupt Comm port support Get AUTO DIAL User definable script files allow use with many modems Send 49 95 plus 3 P amp H Also
295. xpedition down the lower Deschutes River Canyon approximately 1 1 2 hours from Bend This trip includes class I IV whitewater with 7 major rapids A deli lunch and the Old Fashioned Bar beque are included in the 70 per person price Busses leave Thursday morning at 7 30 a m sharp Check in at the Pinckney Center registration table by 7 00 a m for a head count and bus loading INTRO TO DESKTOP SEMINAR White water rafting not your thing Then try the day long introduction to desktop publishing featuring those desktop ne er do wells from Micro C Carol Steffy Sandy Thompson and David Thompson You ll be introduced to scanning Ventura ing PageMaking computer graphics generation the works You ll break into groups for design competitions and problem solving Plus you ll get fed Included in the 65 price are lunch and the barbeque cookout This seminar must be prepaid and will run from 9 a m to 5 p m Thursday July 14 Check in at the Pinckney Center registration desk Thursday morning For more informa tion contact Carol Steffy at 503 382 8048 THE OLD FASHIONED BARBEQUE Will be held at Shevlin Park Thursday evening Since Saga Foods did such a fine job of making sure we had plenty to eat last year they will again be cooking 88 MICRO CORNUCOPIA 41 May June 1988 Its SOG time again The seventh annual SEMI OFFICIAL GET TOGETHER SOG is com ing to Bend Oregon July 14 through July 16 1988 The confer
296. y You can even use Ventura to print out beautifully the style sheet info I had problems using this package to modify a style sheet the numeric displays for leading spacing etc were weird but if I entered a number several times it finally took I just talked to the author and the problem s fixed in version 1R0 1 This is by far the most complete style sheet printer editor Definitely worth considering now that they ve polished up the rough spots A limited version of Withstyle should be available soon on the Micro C RBBS It only handles five tags Meanwhile the shareware style sheet displayer is rough but then it hasn t been released I ll keep you posted Withstyle 79 95 version 1R0 1 Pecan Software Systems Inc 1410 39th St Brooklyn NY 11218 Two Good Books If you re planning to get into desktop publishing on a PC you should pick up Desktop Publishing With Style by Daniel Will Harris This is a huge look at the whole PC publishing arena from Ventura to hard disk utilities Daniel compares some of the graphics packages Desktop packages typesetters laser printers dot matrix printers Cheap options with reasonable results etc It s a book that ll get you up to speed on the whole desktop publishing arena and you ll enjoy his style The writing is friendly and easy to read If you already have Ventura Publisher and are looking for hints and kinks I d recommend Ventura Tips and Tricks It s the bo
297. y first image The Microtek may be the PC editors choice but it isn t the Micro C editor s choice The HP s software was so easy to use that I was generating images within ten minutes And it never ate a FAT or gar baged an image I ve tried to find a paint program or other package which supported the MSF 300 C No luck They all support the HP Today I received some welcome news Microtek will be releasing a bug fix in March Unfortunately I ll have to pay 49 for the fixed version or sign up for one year of support for 150 Meanwhile HP is sending out new software with new features free to registered owners And the HP scanner would have been cheaper Microtek also sent a package called Gemmate No documentation no read me file just a disk Very little help from tech support It turns out that Gemmate lets you run the scanner while inside Ventura Great However Gemmate won t give you even a rough look at the image so you re scan ning blind Thanks but no thanks Reflection Out of the blue where else came a care package from IMSI In that package was a small translation program called Reflection and Reflection cured my tif with Microtek Microtek s Eyestar package generates reasonable TIF files Reflection can turn TIF files despite a few erroneous charac ters left by Eyestar into PCX files Once I have PCX files I can edit the images with Publisher s Paintbrush and dump them into Ventura Hooray

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