> -----Original Message-----
> Never used Pascal myself, but a co-worker wrote me a File Management
> program that started AutoCAD, on MS-DOS 5 under Windows 3.11 and passed
> startup commands to it. Borland Turbo Pascal had a nice facility for
> starting another DOS Shell in which you could start another program with
> full memory available to the program, including the 386K of Extended
> Memory in a 1Mb system.
This brings back memories of one of the more 'serious' things I wrote in Turbo
Pascal (for DOS) before moving on to C, which was a mouse-driven application
launcher for my sister's PC. That was the first thing I used where I called
interrupts (to interface with the DOS mouse driver), and although it started
out with a hand-built data file for defining each of the applications in the
launcher menu I did eventually add on a data file maintenance (add/edit/remove
entries) subsystem which was also mouse-driven. It wasn't exactly enormous,
but it was the largest project I wrote in Turbo Pascal.
I was also an early adopter of the multi-monitor workstation once I got VGA - I
had a Hercules clone MDA adapter and an amber monitor off to one side of my
desk. You could switch between your colour and MDA monitors using the DOS
'mode' command, and Turbo Pascal (as well as Turbo C) had a dual monitor option
you could enable where it would display program output on whichever monitor was
active at launch, and the IDE interface on the other monitor. This was
fabulous for line-by-line debugging because normally TP would have to flash
between the output screen and the IDE every time you hit the F-key for stepping
to the next line, which was not only slow but you couldn't really see what had
happened on the output screen. With the output on its own monitor you could
watch it as it changed, and the steps were pretty much instantaneous. Fun
times!
I also kept this dual setup when I was running OS/2, because not only did TP
and TC still work fine with dual monitors in a full-screen DOS box in OS/2, but
you could leave something running in a DOS box in the background which you had
full-screened and switched to mono, and it would stay on the mono monitor for
you to keep an eye on it when you hit Ctrl-ESC to go back to the OS/2 GUI.
IIRC, I think Turbo C for OS/2 also would let you output a text-mode program
full-screen to the mono monitor even though it was a GUI-based IDE...
jim
