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This story is really on the fence for me. Its not bad but then again at the time it scare me to death.
Way back in the good ole days. This was after the IBM Computer was introduced. Maybe a couple of years after the first one.
I was in a local community college studying Computer Science. So I had my hands in several languages trying to learn them; Paschal, Basic, Cobol and Assembler.
Well the Assembler at school was not what I would call an assembler but our professor used it. It was on the mainframe and basically it was just loading registers, dumping the memory and doing simple command instructions like that.
I got a case of the boredoms and I started to experiment with PC Assembler. At the time I was a subscriber to PC Magazine and during those days they would publish a neat little Assembler program that actually did something useful.
I would type in that code and pick it apart.
I had an idea that I would write a TSR application. A TSR stood for “Terminate and Stay Resident”. This way the program would continue running while you could do something else with the computer like word processing.
So I decided on writing a Clock. My goal was to have the clock appear in the upper right hand corner of the screen and he user could see the cloack all of the time even with the word processor running.
Eventually, I had high hopes of adding an alarm and having it able to toggle between normal time and military time.
Since I worked 2nd shift in a computer room there were a couple of these PCs around the office area. So after my regular work was done I would go out and start writing my Assembler code.
I finally finished the coding. I compiled the code and corrected a couple of errors and then I executed it.
The Clock jumped to life and it did appear in the upper corner of this monochrome monitor. It looked so good.
Then what appeared to be a 30 seconds or so. The clock started advancing in time really quicking just like a digital stop watch.
And then the screen suddenly went blank and a large vertical green line appeared in the center of the monitor and then it reduced quickly to a small dot in the center of the screen. And then the monitor made a loud Pop. And the screen was completely blank.
I quickly shutdown the power to the computer and I just sat there.
What if the monitor was ruined? What if the computer was blown?
These sencerios were running rampant in my mind along with the sweating. I could not afford to buy this thing.
So with a shaky hand I restarted the computer.
Thanks goodness! It started up and appeared to be normal. Whew!
