I'm in Délkút, at Ileš's place, trying to put together a help system for DentoSys. Just writing genhlp so someone who actually can write hungarian can fill in the help text. Should have internal links, seealso links and other stuff, as expected of a help system.
That's when I think I first visited Gemenc and saw Szoftex. Nothing was the way I imagined it. First off, the city is a pannonian one, only to the right of the main street (facing north as we drove in). To the left there are hills, the easternmost edge of the Alps, all covered in vineyards. Second, the firm is in a village house the likes of which can be found in any village around here, pressed clay walls with rolled on painted pattern and a gonk, unfortunately closed with glass panes. The faces... nothing special, what I'm already used to. The secretary is sweet, and so is her coffee, but then it's weak and no good at all. Ummm... if I have to get used to that kind of coffee, it better pays well. The boss is a weird guy, his tiny W moustache is to ROFLMAOPIMP*, I managed to keep a straight face until I got used to it. At least he speaks serbian so Ileš didn't have to translate everything.
The machines were mostly threeeightsixes, some foureightsixes, from Acer, made to be as cheap as possible. The housings, ouch, it's not that you shouldn't sit on it, it's that you're not sure you could stack up more than three before the bottom one crumples. Thin sheet metal covered with plastic. Keyboards solid, that's okay, but they all have hungarian layout, which is as crazy as can't be crazier (will be superseded in the top position when I meet belgian layout ten years later). Luckily, it uses codepage 852, which also covers us. This is where I decided to quit yuscii (aka juski) and switch to 852, as the current DOS (5.0 or 6.2? mmm... 5.0, as 6.2 was published last year but we haven't seen it until 1995) provides it at the system level, with šđžčć (i.e. áéíóúöüőű for hungarian) included in the system without any special messing around, just two lines in config.sys and two in autoexec. Do that for the whole machine and we're done.
And yes, 3,5" floppies everywhere. Big floppy is dead. There was some machine with it almost always, but that was usually something brought to be fixed by the hardware guys.
And I see some reb-hlp.prg and gen-proj.prg, which means we decided to package everything into a single exe, not to carry all the source around, as we did in DBA. Also, some payments are handled, at least the initial version of the payment form was created today.
On 10th, lots of framework code, various generators of this or that have a version with that date, tools to search/replace/fix various things. Still in Délkút, "instead of .gpr goes .prg" in GenerAll's opisfmm4.prg, which means I wanted to have a different extension for my generated code - as fox itself does for generated menus and screens (later called forms, or what we still call masks), with .mpr and .spr - but ran into trouble and reverted to .prg extension. There's also a corrI'm in Délkút, at Ileš's place, trying to put together a help system for DentoSys. Just writing genhlp so someone who actually can write hungarian can fill in the help text. Should have internal links, seealso links and other stuff, as expected of a help system.
That's when I think I first visited Gemenc and saw Szoftex. Nothing was the way I imagined it. First off, the city is a pannonian one, only to the right of the main street (facing north as we drove in). To the left there are hills, the easternmost edge of the Alps, all covered in vineyards. Second, the firm is in a village house the likes of which can be found in any village around here, pressed clay walls with rolled on painted pattern and a gonk, unfortunately closed with glass panes. The faces... nothing special, what I'm already used to. The secretary is sweet, and so is her coffee, but then it's weak and no good at all. Ummm... if I have to get used to that kind of coffee, it better pays well. The boss is a weird guy, his tiny W moustache is to ROFLMAOPIMP*, I managed to keep a straight face until I got used to it. At least he speaks serbian so Ileš didn't have to translate everything.
The machines were mostly threeeightsixes, some foureightsixes, from Acer, made to be as cheap as possible. The housings, ouch, it's not that you shouldn't sit on it, it's that you're not sure you could stack up more than three before the bottom one crumples. Thin sheet metal covered with plastic. Keyboards solid, that's okay, but they all have hungarian layout, which is as crazy as can't be crazier (will be superseded in the top position when I meet belgian layout ten years later). Luckily, it uses codepage 852, which also covers us. This is where I decided to quit yuscii (aka juski) and switch to 852, as the current DOS (5.0 or 6.2? mmm... 5.0, as 6.2 was published last year but we haven't seen it until 1995) provides it at the system level, with šđžčć (i.e. áéíóúöüőű for hungarian) included in the system without any special messing around, just two lines in config.sys and two in autoexec. Do that for the whole machine and we're done.
And yes, 3,5" floppies everywhere. Big floppy is dead. There was some machine with it almost always, but that was usually something brought to be fixed by the hardware guys.
And I see some reb-hlp.prg and gen-proj.prg, which means we decided to package everything into a single exe, not to carry all the source around, as we did in DBA. Also, some payments are handled, at least the initial version of the payment form was created today.
On 10th, lots of framework code, various generators of this or that have a version with that date, tools to search/replace/fix various things. Still in Délkút, "instead of .gpr goes .prg" in GenerAll's opisfmm4.prg, which means I wanted to have a different extension for my generated code - as fox itself does for generated menus and screens (later called forms, or what we still call masks), with .mpr and .spr - but ran into trouble and reverted to .prg extension. There's also a correct.prg (where I found that comment), which goes through any .err files (compiler errors logged), opens the corresponding .prg, lets me edit it, compiles, goes to next. In a few runs I could clean up the whole app.
Interestingly, the framework files have just the date but no time, while the DentoSys files bear times of 19:30 and later, which means I kept working on them at Ileš's in the evening. Until about midnight, then there's a pack.bat (probably just a copy of one of the standard such files) and then I zipped everything.
The next file is on 12th, which is a thursday, setcolor.prg, which bears a comment as being done on Ledinje... which sounds about right. They had an office still on the premises of kombinat, just 100m behind Big Ćale's erc, which means smack in my old neighborhood, three blocks from the old house, or four from the new one if I took a shortcut by the railroad. I'd visit them, secretively, in the morning, before going to work at DBA. They were our first, tentative, customer, and we kept working for them in this unofficial manner for several months. Their main accountant was very pleased with what he did, and he was quite important to us - he was among the doyens of the trade, he was consulted when laws regarding agriculture were written, he'd get the proposed text to check. One of those guys who knew just about everything in his field. Yet by the looks of him he was just an ordinary guy, nothing special. Who'd a thunk...
On 13th, the paired little prg to set the color scheme, again on Ledinje, then also poruka.prg (messinger), which will later be put together with another one and give birth to alert.prg. It got its own window today, and generally stayed as it was until in 2006 I just yanked all of its code out and made it just call alert.prg.
More work on DentoSys, GenerAll and Ledinje till the end of month - for one, "Nézd meg" is now an option in gen&underscore;upu.prg, which also now knows how to format the text for ventura. Didn't need multilingual work before, now it's not only hungarian and serbian 852, but also have to keep yuscii as an option for places where they still have those pesky hercules cards, where the positions of šđžčć are welded to those of braces etc. In the future I'll add serbian cyrillic too, but will never really use it in any real life situation.
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* rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off, peeing in my pants