filePro/menus/scripts/etc (was Re: [SOLVED] EXPORT ASCII won't - after action report)

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2014, Jay Ashworth wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Kenneth Brody" <kenbrody at spamcop.net>
>
>> I saw a system that had replaced all of the filePro menus with a filePro
>> "menu" file, consisting of fields for the menu name, item keystroke, command
>> to run, and comment. (It looked as if all of the the filePro and user menus
>> had been imported into this file.) Then, there was a "permissions" table,
>> which listed which users were allowed to run which choices on any given
>> menu. A master processing table was where everything started, which
>> controlled access to all of the menus.
>> 
>> Elegant solution, but a pain initially to figure out what command line
>> a particular user was running.
>
....
>Ah... the good old days.

>My very first programming job was for Harris Data Corp, in 1981, on an IBM
>System/23 Datamaster (the Model II's counterpart, though it had a fixed
>3270- like keyboard).

My first programming was on a Bendix G-20 mainframe in 1966,
FORTRAN, then Assembly.  From there I went to Burroughs
mainframes, ALGOL, and a dozen or so other languages.

My first *nix experience was in late 1982, Xenix on the Radio
Shack Model 16.  I spent a lot of time with Thompson's blue book
on Unix and reading system shell scripts.

>There was a batch language around BASIC, but you had no control flow.

>So the work around was, Batch File A calls Basic Program A, which *asks
>questions and then writes Batch File B*... which is the next thing Batch
>File A calls.  I saw (or did; I don't recall) this same thing later in CP/M
>on a North Star.

I didn't do anything with DOS until late 1989 or so when I got
the Elvis vi style program and perl for DOS.  I wrote a system to
do automatic off-site backups using dialup modems.  My system
used perl to do the heavy lifting, and the perl scripts would
write batch files then get out of the way to free as much memory
as possible.  One of the major problems was sorting as the DOS
sorts were limited to what would fit in RAM.  If I remember
correctly, I used the MKS toolkit which provided a *nix sort
program that would handle much larger jobs.

Bill
-- 
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