Once I thought With Visual Basic I Could Program Anything

Truth of the matter: the first Visual Basic I tried was not a version I bought, though I can't for the life of me remember if I had a demo version on one of the disks I did buy (such as office 97), or I downloaded a free version from the web, or I downloaded an illegal version.

Come to think of it, I think it came on one of the disks, and I think it was before web times, and I'm pretty sure I did not try it on my computer, but rather on my girlfriend's computer. Sometime in 1993, or 1994.

I tried to create a simple adventure game. Something that would display some text and a picture, and then move you to some other 'place' also with a text and a picture, depending on what you clicked.

In other words, something that is easy to do today with HTML only...

I was so impressed with VB back then! I could do all of these things, and let's face it, the interface was amazing!

today, there is nothing that can match the simplicity and the elegance it had back then, including, sadly, the newer versions of VB.

that left me seriously hoping that Dart would evolve nicely...

Once I Thought Excel Was a Great Tool

I taught Math or something like Computer Literacy to children several times, in several different schools, to different ages.

For several years I thought that Excel was a great tool for doing that.

I mean, isn't it Great?  you put '1' in Square A2 (you need A1 for the title)

then you put =a2+1 in A3. Then you copy all the way down to A41, and there you have the numbers from 1 to 40, right there...

Then you do them multiplied by 10 in column B, Squared in column C, and Cubed (divided by 10) in column D. Then you do a graph...

So much math. All of it done by the students themselves. takes so little time.

And you can also do Pascal's triangle...

No wonder I thought excel was a great tool.

But this little graph you see above?

I made it with Google Documents.

Why?

For starters, I didn't have to pay for the software...

Once I thought I could rule the world with auto summarize

Let me say this right from the start: Microsoft Word 97 was a REALLY good word processor. I might even say, the best word processor I have ever used, though Google docs starts to come close.

You could put pictures right into your documents, and it didn't even crash your computer. There were tons of fonts...

And also,  Word 97 was the first (and last) Microsoft word processor I had a legal copy of. There were even more cool Hebrew fonts on the CD itself, if you only knew where to look, and I looked all over the CD.

Then there was auto summarize. It highlighted the important 20 percent in your document. I was really impressed with that. I thought it could be used to create a machine that would pass the Turing test...

Maybe I was a little too enthusiastic on that account, but still, it was a heck of a good deal. It only cost me something like 30$ on the computer store (gone since then) at the Hebrew university, up on Mount Scopus.

Little Big Adventure

So, like I said two weeks ago, in the fall of 1995 I moved back to Haifa, and got myself a Pentium 90.
I was starting my graduate studies in Economics, but that only started in late October, and I moved in mid September. Also, it took me some time to find jobs to fill the free time I had from my scheduled studies.
That means I had a lot of free time on my hands, and most of it went to playing Little Big Adventure. It was a cool adventure game, all in 3D, and very difficult.
You are the hero of the game, and you begin imprisoned in an asylum. since you can't save your progress until the end of a chapter (or something like that) I had to play the first chapter something like fifty times!
I still remember the line: 'A prisoner has escaped! Sound the Alarm!' as if it was yesterday.
I'm sad to say (Maybe I should be happy to say it?) that I never finished that game. It was too difficult, and soon my work schedule, and my studies schedule started filling up.
It was a good game though. I still wonder how it ends.

PS, I also never figured out why the elephant...

Newsflash: Winning the Amichai prize

Sometime in 2008 my friend Pavel from Ashan Hazman (Note, link in Hebrew, it's a really cool bookshop + Pub + Bar + Rock concert place in Beer Sheva), told me that the poet Mois Benarroch was trying for years to publish a poetry book, but no publisher wanted to take it.

I said I'd be glad to do it. I like the guy's poetry, and I thought that it was turned down by other publishers for spurious reasons.

Like anything else in publishing, it took a longer time than we thought, and it ended up costing more money (though compared to the two books I published just before that, it was relatively cheap).

We ended up publishing it in late 2010, the cover designed by yours truly (I did not do the painting, and I think the cover design is pretty awful...)

We never sold too many copies, but never mind, the guy deserved to be published.

Then earlier this week it was announced officially that the book won the Yehuda Amichai prize for poetry in 2012. I was ecstatic. this one will go down in history. Though I have to wander if that also means it's going to sell better...

PS. just to show you that this did not go to my head, I promise to go back to windows 95 games next week. (Al, sorry for the delay, I hope you understand...)

Windows 95

In September 1995 I moved back to Haifa after my BA studies at the Hebrew university. At the time I also split with my girlfriend after we have been together for something like seven years on and off. This meant that I had way too much time on my hands, which is always a dangerous thing.

So one of the things I did with my time was get a computer. It was really expansive compared to today's computers, and (something like 2000$), but it was also really powerful. I was a Pentium 90 MHz!

At first I only had windows 3.1 (my alert readers know how I had it...), but then pretty soon I 'obtained' windows 95.

What wonderful software did I run on it?

For that, dear readers, you will have to wait until the next week.

Word for Windows

When I told you about doing the booklets for Noam, I was not telling the whole truth. The whole truth is that we had to print out all of the booklets on a windows computer before we could do the graphic design in Kibbutz Hannaton.

So we had everything in Word for windows 2.0 the Hebrew version (back in the day they had to make a Hebrew version for every word processor, apparently now they don't, at least not for Microsoft word...)

It was a terrible piece of software. It got stuck even on very small files, and our files were not so small (though we did split every booklet to at least four files, which meant we had something like 24 files to print). for some reason, even though the files were only something like 20 pages each, it would not print more than about five at a time...

We did it all on Friday, and just finished in time for Shabbat...

That was 1994.

As these things go, we had to do a complete rewrite of the booklets by 1995, and print them out again. This time it was really easy. Everyone (the writers, the designers, me, the printers...) had Hebrew Word for Windows 5.0 (I'm not saying they were all legal copies...)

But we had no problems at all. We could do nifty graphic design (Columns, pictures...) and we could print 20 page files no problem.

That's when we finally switched to Windows, and didn't have to go to Kibbutz Hannaton to print...

Windows 3.1

Back in 1993, Israel has started the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians, and me and my girlfriend moved to a new apartment. These were heady exciting days...

1993 was second year university (the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) for both of us, and during the first year we both lived in the dorms, she with a friend (female), and me with five roommates (all male). This was also fun, but second year we wanted to really try being a couple. 

I hope I won't sound really weird by saying that one of the advantages was that we had her computer. I can only justify this by saying we needed a computer for our studies (me sort of, she really), and that we both worked on it for our jobs (informal Jewish education, we sort of worked together).

Anyway, in the 1990s Israel was known as the one diskette country. That meant the Microsoft for example sold one copy of each piece of software. I just 'obtained' a copy of Microsoft windows 3.1 (from the office we worked in...) and installed it on our (hers really) computer.

What can I say. It was a good operating system. You can see for yourselves in the picture above...

King's Quest V - Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder

The Wikipedia Article about this game says that is came out in November 1990. Dunno about that. All I can say is that my girlfriend had it on her DOS computer at her home, when I was in the IDF, and later in Kibbutz Hannaton.

That means we played it over weekends and holidays (though not on Shabbat...). I think she got it for me for my 21st birthday, so late 1991. I'm pretty sure we finished it almost exactly a year later, just the day before Yom Kippur 1992.

So back in the day we were devoted to point and click adventure games, and also it was so much harder to find the answers to the riddles. I do remember that we did have some way to find the answers, especially to the end part, where you have to turn to all sorts of animals. I just can't, for the life of me, remember how we had that, because there was no internet at the time.

It had cost 120 NIS at the time, which is something like 40$ today, not bad for a year of entertainment...

MS DOS Can Set You Free

Just so everyone will know what I'm talking about. DOS - stands for Disk Operating System, and MS stands for Microsoft.

So back in the 1990s all computers came with DOS (Here in Israel litarally all of them came with MS-DOS, but I guess in the US some other flavors such as DR-DOS were at least a little popular...)

Truth of the Matter, I didn't know a lot of DOS, only something like three commands:

1. DIR meant directory, it showed you all the files (and directories) in a certain directory (now it's called a folder).
2. CD meant Change Directory. CD.. meant go up one level in the file structure.
3. Writing the name of an .exe file (something like rayman.exe) ran that file
4. Oh, and RM removed files, but I was always too scared to use it...

So back in the day, anyone who knew as much as I did could infer the entire file structure of the computer in a few minutes. Sure, there were no impressive icons, and the resolution was not that of the New iPad, but can anyone tell what the file structure of that is?

Kind of makes you wander about Big Brother...

Back is 1986 CP/M Was Too Cool For Me

I've already written here before about my Commodore 128. I don't really remember the store I bought it from, only that it looked more like vegetable store than, say, an iStore.

I also don't remember exactly how much it had cost. I think it was something like 300 Canadian dollars. BTW, oddly enough a lot of my Canadian friends did not own computers, and the school certainly didn't (besides the management and the Librarian's computer for the book catalog).

This Commodore 128 came with a floppy disk drive, and I remember I could buy a hard disk for another 300 (Canadian) dollars or so and CP/M for another 300. 

I seriously considered all of this, but I decided against it. I had a little money of my own at the time, but this all seemed like too much, and I had no clear use for it.

Which starts to make my point. DOS was a seriously good invention!

Press Play On Tape

So last week I told you all about my first experiences with a computer working on DOS. But let me back up a little. I bet many people reading this do not know that DOS stands for Disk Operating System, and as I said last week I have been working with that since late 1991. So what did we do before that?
My first computer was a ZX Spectrum (picture below, because it looks kinda cool). My friend Tzachi, who died about 15 years ago, thus far too young, had a Commodore 64 (BTW, C-64 still finds it on Google, yay!).
Both the ZX Spectrum, and the C-64 worked with Audio Cassette Tapes (maybe I should put in a picture of one of these guys too, but in the mean time, Google it).
My ZX spectrum had a whopping 48K of RAM and the C-64 had, well 64.
So if we wanted to play a game we put a cassette in the player, and the computer 'heard' the program (sort of like the old modems).
This was a computer without a Disk Operating System, or indeed a Disk. It knew just one program when you turned it on, usually some version of BASIC. This meant that in order to LOAD your program you had to LOAD it, so we all knew BASIC (or at least the LOAD command).
In those good old days, illegal copying of programs was done with a double cassette tape...
So anyway, one fall day in 1984 me and Tzachi went up to his apartment and we told the computer to LOAD something (I think it was Fort Apocalypse). Whenever you told that to the C-64, it said: 'press play on tape'. so we pressed play on some other tape, and listened to some music. We thought it was funny.

An Unexpected Post - Out In The Dark

My friend Michael Mayer just finished making this film.
Come check it out!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Out-In-The-Dark-%D7%A2%D7%9C%D7%98%D7%94-%D8%B8%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85/235557469872298?sk=wall

The Einstein Word Processor

It was December 1991, and I was ecstatic. You see, my military service in the IDF was in the Nahal. At the time this meant that a significant part of the service was not in the IDF itself, but in some Kibbutz.
So by December 1991, my 'real' military service was over, and all I had to do was stay at the Kibbutz for several months, and teach kids from junior high schools about the expulsion from Spain (which happened in 1992, so in 1992 we 'celebrated' 500 years).
So we prepared to teach them, and we planned tons of fun activities, and we had to write them down on a computer. This was the first computer I had to use since my high school days (1986) and the Commodore 128.
THE word processor to use back in the day was Einstein writer (see picture above), naturally the computer itself ran on MS-DOS.
I don't know why I knew this, but I knew that before I write anything at all I should read ALL of the help file <Alt H>, so I did.
Never regretted that one.

Let Me Start From The End

But first let me explain this picture. When Ehud Barak was the Prime Minister of Israel (1999-2001), he was well known for saying to anyone who spoke at a meeting to 'Start from the End, or Start from the Bottom Line'. I think this exemplifies his somewhat abrasive, but sometimes useful way of thinking, but we have not gathered here to talk of Ehud Barak.

So my 'Start From the End' goes something like this. Last Saturday, I wanted to upgrade my (legally bought) Windows XP to an (illegally downloaded) Windows 7.

I had no problem downloading and installing it. But it ruined my access to the partition of Ubuntu Linux  (11.10) I had.

So no problem. I re-installed Linux, which was a good thing, because I had a zillion partitions, and asked it to install itself on all of the hard drive.

Big mistake. As far as Microsoft is concerned. the shiny new win 7 would not install itself on a partition that is not NTFS. 

Thus, for the first time in something like 17 years, my main computer does not even run Windows.

That tells you something about what I think of Microsoft products right now.

But still, I think Microsoft made some great products over the years, and I have used many of them. 

Let the upcoming series of posts be some sort of a Eulogy to this great company.

And once again, let me Start from the End: I think Microsoft made more great products over the years than Apple has.