In the winter of 2012/13 I came to find a stash of software I wrote between roughly 1992 and 1996, for the Acorn Archimedes computers At that time I was in secondary school and I spent roughly 3 hours each day in "computer club" programming. This was roughly between the ages of 12 and 16.
I had been meaning to locate this software for a while. The straw that broke the camel's back was the release of RiscOS for the Raspberry Pi; an image that can be chucked on an SD card to turn my £20 Pi into a machine far more capable than the machines I was working with at the time. It worked like a dream.
The person who actually found the code was Brian Kiff, a long term friend and one time mentor. Brian basically taught me to program whilst I was at school. I guess I was lucky that someone knew how to; the teachers certainly didn't.
I've lumped all the software into this repository to make life easier. Each program I wrote has a folder which contains a binary download (that you can actually download and use on a RiscOS machine) plus "converted" browseable source. I've tried to turn all the files into something that you can just view via Github, so the BASIC source code has been detokenized and the sprites have been turned into PNGs etc. Some of the programs include a readme file - as written at the time. I think I actually went through and added all the readme files when my time at the school was drawing to a close; hence why all the dates are around 96/97.
So far I've published:
- Notify: send very simple messages to other machines on the network
I downloaded the RiscOS image and then used RPi-sd card builder to put the image onto an SD card. From there, RiscOS booted up no problem.
The Archimedes computers ran an Econet network. I can still remember the early models in our school being connected via the 5 pin DIN. By the time I wrote most of my code, the networks ran over 10BASE2 Ethernet; but the underlying protocol was still Econet.
As explained here:
An Econet network was made up of a number of stations. Two networks could be connected by means of a Bridge. Each computer connected was uniquely identified by two numbers. The first was the station number, which could be between 1 and 254, the second was the network number, which could be between 1 and 127.
To get Econet working in the modern world, "Acorn Universal Networking" was created.
The term "AUN" has had many meanings in the past, but what we today call "AUN" in RISC OS Select is a way to allow these Econet-based applications to be run over an TCP/IP network (typically Ethernet).
I had a degree of trouble getting this working out of the box with the Pi
version. The problem was that the NetI module was not part of the
distribution - meaning there was no AUN support. With some assistance
from the community forums
at RiscOS Open, I managed to get a copy of the NetI module and get it
up and running.
http://old-www.moreofthesa.me.uk/progs.graphics.html
It's a fascinating experience being able to look back at code I wrote so long ago. It also evokes many memories of actually building this stuff. At the time it seemed quite unbelievable to get a "WIMP" program running (a program that was integrated into the RiscOS desktop - Windows Icons Menus Pointers).
It's also interesting to consider the context that I learned within. Our school had no Internet. I knew the Internet existed, but had never used it. Occasionally I would get my older brother, who was doing a Phd at Nottingham University, to download RiscOS applications off the Internet, put them on 3 1/2 inch disks and mail them to me. Then I would have to grab the files off of these DOS disks, run them through UUDecode and then finally unzip the contents. It wasn't all that straight forward. So I knew all the programs that were available, my brother would send me printed out listings in the post.
All my programs were written in BASIC. One interesting feature of BBC Basic was that you could make system calls directly to the operating system. The Programmer's Reference Manual (PRM) had full documentation of all of these SWIs.
Aside: the PRMs are still my canonical example of excellent technical documentation.
Here's what it looked like from BASIC:
SYS"Econet_ReadLocalStationAndNet" TO thisstat%,thisnet%
SWI calls often involved passing byte buffers around. The documentation would specify what the bits and bytes at each offset into the buffer would represent. To work with this, BBC Basic had a bunch of interesting features. The pling and query operators were the two I used most heavily. These provided [32 bit and 8 bit indirection] (http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcwin/manual/bbcwin2.html#operators) respectively. There was also a need to work with binary. To some extent, this was something I'd already learned for doing UDGs on the Spectrum.
Nearly all my programs rely on global state. A common pattern is to have some procedure that would alter global state. Thus to understand a program you have to pay close attention to an entire code path, so you know where the global state is mutated. 20 years on, I have to stop myself refactoring it all. :)
Looking at my programs on an enormous HD TV, one thing is clear: I wrote these programs for a very specific screen resolution. This probably made sense. I mainly wrote these programs for me, to run in my school. Every machine was identical. It seems it never dawned on me that someone might have a bigger screen.
This shows up in my programs:
- when I "centre" things on screen (they're not actually centred)
- in my interactive aquarium background (it doesn't fill the screen)
- in a couple of programs that constrain the mouse within a space and then return it back to full screen (I manage to lock it down to a small square bottom left of my TV!)
I recognise a certain pragmatism in my programs. I learned just enough to make them work. Based on how hard it was to acquire knowledge (no Internet, only books, and few people who knew how to do things), I think this was a good approach.
I had a fascination with network apps. The largest program I wrote (and rewrote over and over again each time I approached completion) was a mailing program.
You can read about the Acorn network here.