[Coco] Minted buffer size

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 07 March 2015 23:14:18 Stephen H. Fischer wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Gene Heskett" <gheskett at wdtv.com>
> To: <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Sent: Saturday, March 07, 2015 7:02 PM
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Minted buffer size
>
> > On Saturday 07 March 2015 19:46:02 Stephen H. Fischer wrote:
[...]
> I used it at lot when I was using a real CoCo and though I had made it
> bullet proof, but as many times you said you fired a gun one Saturday,
> perhaps not.

One of many hobbies I have.
>
> More details would be interesting but then perhaps not as it has been
> so many years since I looked at the code.
>
> The version I started with was from one of the OS-9 user disks and was
> a real horror and I lost editing sessions many times until it was
> somewhat stable.
>
> We users tend to use programs in ways the author never did so I might
> have missed something.
>
> I gave it to a local CoCo Software collector (Thief) who gave it to a
> few friends but I never got any feedback or help with the
> documentation that was promised.

There could be an echo in here. :)

> All I can say is what a Doctor said when the patent said it hurt when
> he raised his arm over his head. "Don't do that."
>
> Series File Output (ALT CTRL O)  is what I would use to save the
> current editing session to a file ever so often, there is no room for
> a timed version like my word processor does.

A habit I should get into, say every 5 minutes or so.
> -------------------------------------
> Bill Pierce once said he was using  an editor with no line limit but
> thinking about that I do wonder if he was actually using a OSK
> version.

Bill?  Your turn.
>
> Your comment about "editors that can handle 100 megabyte files." Is
> how I handle the problem.

Well, when you had 64 megabytes of memory, and a fixed copy of ced on an 
amiga, you were in good shape.  But now I have 8Gb and I've had some 
pretty huge files loaded into geany. 

Backing up to the coco, DynaStar was essentially unlimited as it could 
load the first 10 or 12k of a file, save that, load the next 12k or so, 
save that, and just keep doing it, once well beyond the 16 bit address 
range so I suspect it was either 24 bit, or possibly even 32 bit 
internally.  But it could not back up, you had to cycle all the way thru 
the file to the end quit and reload the first 12k again if you needed to 
change something in that first load.  While impressive that it could 
actually handle a file bigger than the cpu was wide, it very quickly 
turned into a PIMA because it could not back up.  When the "vi" patch 
for tsedit came about, and it could handle a 56k file, I never looked 
back and its been my editor of choice for close to 20 years now.

> I have the "C" source code from Dr. Dobbs for "RED" which could handle
> files bigger than memory.

I wonder how that would work if SAS-C V6.58 was pointed at it?  For the 
amiga.  I still have a copy, and I have one of the gfx monsters from the 
tv station sitting downstairs, needing a custom PC psu, but in the 
process of pulling it out of video production after I retired, somebody 
threw away all the docs AND that customized external psu that went with 
it.  It has a good size HD in it, a 68060 cpu card, 16 megs of dram, a 
toaster and a kitchen synch in it.

> We lost a lot of talent when OSK came out and the people who could
> have fixed many of the things troubling us just left just like I did
> when Borland Turbo 'C" showed that there was a better way.

I have seen some of that src code, I also have both K&R books, roughly 2 
more feet of shelf space written by other well regarded C proponents and 
to me, that statement is debatable.  Borland C has its own dialect of C, 
and normal C code will need several edits per line of code before 
Borland can make runnable binaries out of it.  I spent, in about 1997, 
about 2 months worth of spare time on a dosbox trying to understand it 
well enough to use it. SAS-C 6.58 on the amiga was so much closer to K&R 
C that I was comfy with it.

I think it depended on faster cpu's & more memory rather than any 
true "elegance" in the code.

Now of course I'm on a wireless keyboard feeding linux over a bluetooth 
circuit, and while I did make a sojourn into the amiga camp for a few 
years, but went from the amiga to linux on a 400 mhz cpu back in '98, I 
never really left the coco3.  In the last 25 years, that machines 
downtime can be measured in months, often while I was contemplating what 
to do about a slowly failing hard drive.  Its been down maybe a week in 
the last year. Probably well over 100k hours on either of the 1Gb 
Seacrate Hawks hooked to a TC^3 controller and spinning right now.

At the present rate of deterioration, I may fall over before it does!

> SHF

Cheers Stephan, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>