Pat Comeau

Here's a pro playing an E9 that he built.

It's an art-form, Joe, and you excelled in your profession. You should be proud.

Lots of folks would make a royal f-up of it, and I would be one of them.

How do you keep a wall perfectly vertical with no bulges?

I feel I wasted my education. I got an electrical engineer's degree and worked as a technician.

All that time (6yr) and money just to be eligible to sign people's passport applications.

I did invent some electronics devices for the TV studio, though, since later I had 3 other people working with me in the R&D dept.

That's where I learned  to program micro-computers (from a book) to run the devices.

One was a TV studio lighting system, and the other was a game-show readout display with the yellow dots.

There were other things also, and in between I did the drawings.

Then came a strike ....

After that my dept was abolished and I was put to down-linking TV programs from satellites.

I worked the night shift after making a mistake and putting a sports program off-air.

It was a BIG effing deal, and the sports people wanted me fired.

Too many day people using limited Bell lines and I overwrote one of them.

At night there was just me, and I knew what as what on the Bell microwave lines since I put it there.

I was not cut out for that job, but was too chicken to throw it away and get an engineering position elsewhere.

Do you belong to "The Masons" organization?

I mean re the "eye" symbol on US money group?

Thanks, Joe.

I like to share knowledge, but stuff I know, many others don't give a hoot about. Everyone excels at something, and with me its code and math, but I can't do the kind of math like Einstein did. And with code its not rocket science code, it's amateur code. But I can figure out a method  to work with text and extract info (most of the time). I'll show a small example next post.

Did you ever get a virus from downloading third-party software?

If you get "freebasic", we can do a step-by-step till you feel 'at-home' with it.

Then you can do online tuts in python and C++ etc, since the thinking is the same, but the grammar (syntax) is different. "Le crayon jaune," type thing.

I'm very glad you learned a bit from me, and online, about HTML and CSS. Now you are doing  things that a year ago you didn't know about. It gives me a friend who speaks the same language.

I just realized I made a mistake in post 231, and edited it.

' Your code needs this envelope to work ...

' You need only 1 apostrophe for a comment, but 2 will signify a special one.

' ' MY FREEBASIC DEMO PROGRAM, by Joe, Jun 2023 ' 'setup ============================== #lang "fblite" screen 15     'a screen selected from a sized list in the IDE

' 'your program stuff below ============================== . . . ' 'ready to exit ============================== sleep end

I'll create a variable to hold a string in freebasic..

Let's say daves_string$ is an area in memory that I named and I stuff  "Hello, Joe" into.

daves_string$ = "Hello, Joe"

Consider daves_string$ as a nick-name on a packing box with a "Hello, Joe" note inside.

The compiler saw the $ on the end and knew the box was supposed to be the kind that holds a string.

It looks like a dollar sign, but does not mean dollars here.

The compiler figures out where in memory to put it  .. I don't care where.

I just know what name I gave it. Put it anywhere you like, compiler.

PRINT is a keyword that (calls a function that) does what it says.

PRINT daves_string$ prints what's in the variable box.

The screen shows:

Hello, Joe

====================

I can also do it like this.

PRINT "Hello, Joe"

The screen shows:

Hello, Joe

====================

We use the variable when we don't know what's going into it yet.

The box is labelled and stored with nothing inside it.

INPUT is a key word that reads the keyboard and sticks what you typed into your empty variable box.

INPUT "Type something! " , thevariable$

Print it if you want, or convert it to a number and mess with it using math, depending what was input.

The message asking for input should state clearly what type of input you want.

Press ENTER when your (user) typing is done?

Mary and sister live across the street from Randy Sodd. Mary has 4 windows which face Randy's house. D | C | B | A A candle in window-A means SIS IS HOME. A candle in window-B means COME OVER. A candle in window-C means COME OVER WITH BEER. A candle in window-D means COME OVER WITH CONDOMS. Let's say a candle burning is a ONE message. No candle burning is a ZERO message Mary can give Randy the following 16 messages:

============== D | C | B | A ============== 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 -------------- 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 -------------- 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 -------------- 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 -------------- 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 -------------- 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 -------------- 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 -------------- 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 -------------- 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 -------------- 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 -------------- 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 -------------- 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 -------------- 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 -------------- 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 -------------- 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 -------------- 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 --------------

Computer memory has "windows" that are transistor switches turned ON or OFF. Your "comp" is a city block of apartments. Each apartment has 32 or 64 "windows". Lots of messages can be sent. The "central processing unit" has the cheat-sheet of what they mean.

The messages can be instructions like PRINT or data like HEY, JOE. The CPU and compiled program know what is what, and perform accordingly. Each letter or instruction needs several windows (or pigeon holes if you use a post-office message center analogy) to be different from all the others.

The pigeon-holes (each 1 BIT) are arranged in 16, 32, or 64 bit WORDS

8 BITS is called a BYTE, so the WORDS are made of several BYTES.

For example, the letter "A" is 0100 0001 = 41hex and can be held in 1 byte.

"B" is 42hex, etc

"HEY" would be:

H= 48 hex = 0100 1000

E= 45 hex = 0100 0101

Y= 59 hex = 0101 1001

That's little transistors turned on or off in memory chips.

The ones and zeros are known as BINARY code.

We use HEX code so humans don't get the 1s and 0's mixed up,

but the comp uses the binary.

Each BYTE has an address, so the comp memory is composed of:

ADDRESS1: BYTE1

ADDRESS2: BYTE2

ADDRESS3: BYTE3

ADDRESS4: BYTE4

...

0D and 0A are carriage return and line-feed. The prog that made the table uses dots to represent non-visible characters, as well as for actual dots (2E).

Below is the ASCII CODE for the keyboard characters, plus a few CTRL characters.

I can make variables from this table. Lets say I want CR$ for carriage return and LF$ for line feed.. It's easier to remember than 0Dh and 0Ah. FREEBASIC CODE FOR THAT: CR$ = chr(0D) LF$ = chr(0A) 'Now, since we use them together we can have CRLF$ = CR$ + LF$ Print "Hey, Joe!" + CRLF$. 'This puts a new line after the message.

The quotes mean it's a string, and appended$ mean it's a string, so we stay concatenated with +.

If the variable were a number we would have to use ; to concatenate.

Age% = 83

print "Dave's age is" ; Age%

It's nice to learn new  and interesting things, Joe. Today I will present a talk on BINARY NUMBERING SYSTEM.

PREAMBLE:

Let's talk about powers of numbers first.
You know about squared and cubed for area and volume.
Let's pick a demo number, say 5.

5 squared is 5 * 5 = 25

A short form is:
5 to the power of 2, or 5^2 = 5 * 5 = 25

A cubed example is:
5^3 = 5 * 5 * 5 = 125

5^1 = 5

Now for something strange:
ANY NUMBER to the power 0 is 1
5^0 = 1

DECIMAL SYSTEM:
We have ten fingers.
Our millions, thousands, hundreds, tens and ones are based on powers of 10.

ten-thousands | thousands | hundreds | tens | ones |
----------------------------------------------------
     10^4         10^3        10^2     10^1   10^0

Now when we state a number WE ADD ALL THE GROUPS TOGETHER.
EXAMPLE:
nine thousand, two hundred, and five.

9205

BINARY SYSTEM:
Transistor switches have two "fingers" ... OFF (0) or ON (1).


2^4 | 2^3 | 2^2 | 2^1 | 2^0 |
-----------------------------
16    8     4     2     1
-----------------------------

Let's take an intuitive jump:

A number like 25 decimal would be
16 + 8 + 1 = 11001 in binary.

OK, homework.

What is 6 decimal in binary?

What is 50 decimal in binary? (hint: extend the table)