Another quick post. This involves a little program I wrote on the Oric Atmos, way back in 1992 - so over 30 years ago! The Atmos was not my first computer - that distinction belongs to the Sinclair 48K - but it was my first love, in the silicon sense, and still is. In fact, I still have, and dust off, my Oric setup on occasion, which is more than I can say about the rest of my 'retro' computer collection.
Anyway, I acquired my Oric computers (1 Atmos, & 2 Oric-1's) during my time in the UK. I also subscribed to an enthusiast-run magazine, the 'Oric User Monthly', (OUM), published by the irrepressible Dave Dick. 'Published' is probably too strong a word - this was pre-internet, so we're talking about dot-matrix printouts, that needed to be photocopied and posted out by Dave to subscribers, no doubt, an arduous task. When I first joined, OUM had well over 100 subscribers - a number which only grew. Before long, I had resolved to learn to program in 6502 assembly, and what better way to start, than to code something substantial, involving a subject I knew practically nothing about, but that had always interested me - morse-code.
Long story short, over the course of about 2 months, I wrote a 'Morse Tutor', a little program that allowed the user to both listen to, and key in, morse-code. I then sent it to Dave Dick, hoping that he'd include it on the Oric User Disk, that was published a couple of times yearly. Needless to say, I was chuffed when Dave said he'd add it to the upcoming disk. He even reviewed it in the magazine, a gracious, yet balanced review, pointing out some of the issues he encountered. Morse Tutor had some huge problems, the biggest of which involved the morse-encoding option. Basically, there was no easy way of exiting the encoding loop, short of turning the computer over and jamming your pinkie into the Reset-button hole, in order to return to the program's Options Menu. The scandalous thing was, I deliberately programmed it like this! I figured that if people found it useful, they'd complain and I'd graciously fix it - thing is, no one complained, in all likelihood because they found it infuriating to use!
And there things lay. I had always planned a fix, if only for myself, but life got in the way. Fast forward 32 years, six months ago, I finally had a look at it. Fixing the 'stuck in loop' problem proved relatively easy, improving existing features, or adding new ones, has proven anything but! Even though I still have the original source-code, it has been a real hassle trying to figure out how, say, the drop-down menus work. As a result, right now, my enthusiasm for continuing is non-existent. But I figure that by posting this, future-me will be cajoled into giving it another shot. Only time will tell.
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