On 03/04/2013 09:56 PM, Yaro Kasear wrote:
On 03/04/2013 08:48 PM, Doug wrote:
On 03/04/2013 09:07 PM, William Ivanski wrote:
On 04-03-2013 22:39, Yaro Kasear wrote:
When (U)EFI completely replaces BIOS THEN DOS will be completely
dead. Right now it's just a horribly obsolete OS used by people
afraid of kernels or enterprises that refuse to upgrade some of
their infrastructure.
It's also used by people who, many years ago, paid for a vital
system which runs on DOS, and nowadays can't pay for a better modern
system
Well, it's also used, occasionally, by people who have software the
equivalent of which does not exist on a modern system.
In addition to programs that were specifically written by a user to
solve some problem, there are some commercial programs that have no
modern equivalent. One that comes immediately to mind is Eureka,
which I think was sold by Borland. Eureka will solve math problems using
standard keyboard notation, ala BASIC, which to my mind is much
easier to deal with than something like MathCad. If you've ever
tried to
enter an equation into MathCad, without months of previous
experience, you'll know exactly what I mean. I have a DosBox routine
installed
specifically to run Eureka, which fortunately is now in the public
domain. (I once had the non-free floppy disks, but even if I could
find them,
they are probably unreadable by this time. Or they were 5¼", which
amounts to the same thing.)
Another program, which I used until I retired in 2002 was EEsof's
Touchstone. An extremely expensive RF cad program, it worked with
netlist
inputs. When HP bought the company, they imposed their graphical
interface, which would have worked really nicely if you had a screen
about 4 feet by 5 feet to draw your circuit on! I suppose a 30"
screen would have worked, but nobody had one in those days. What you
could
do in two typed pages of netlist would fit nicely on a D- or E-sized
drawing, graphically. Sure, you sketched it out on several pieces of
paper
first by hand, but you didn't put in 4 or 5 parameters for every last
component like HP required. There is no modern equivalent that I
know of,
and the old program is not available at any price. This is progress?
(I'm only kidding about that last remark--I wouldn't give up my GUI,
but I could wish that some of the old smarts still existed. If you
think that
the modern graphical approach is so great, try taking pictures
outdoors with one of those nice 2" x 3" LCD displays. Give me an
eye-level
viewfinder any day!)
--doug
Oh no, if you read my e-mail a few replies ago my point was NOT "GUI
can/should do everything." It was the opposite. I stated I felt this
fear of the command line was bad (I like my desktop, I just find
there's oodles of power and speed to be had on a command line not had
on a desktop.) I was talking about DOS's command line. I *love* POSIX
shells, I can do just about anything with them. Not much capability in
COMMAND.COM, if you get my meaning.
I'm trying to understand what you're meaning on the Touchstone
software... what feature exactly did it have that the billions of
other CAD tools don't? I don't know what "netlist" is.
Regards.
Here is part of a netlist for a device made in microstrip , designed to
work at 1296MHz (1.296GHz) The device is made on a substrate
which is 60 mil thick with a relative dielectric constant of 4.2. It
consists of one input line (1 to 2) two lines coming off the end of that
line
(2 to3 and 2 to 5) the length (l1) and width (w1) of them to be
determined by the program, a resistor between the far ends of those lines,
i.e., between nodes 3 and 5, of 100 ohms, and two output lines, one from
3 to 4, one from 5 to 6. This device is called a Wilkinson hybrid.
The program will go on to specify the impedance match at each port, the
isolation between ports 4 and 6, and will measure the loss from
port 1 to port 4. If any of the specifications are not met, the program
sill still attempt to meet the requirements, and determine what the
best solution is, and print out the results. The variables and their
limits would be defined in real life, but are omitted here, as are the
isolation value and the thru loss. To draw this graphically, per HP,
each line would have all the parameters, including the substrate,
listed next to it's picture. The design would take up about 2½ x 5
inches on screen, more than it would actually take when built. Just
about all
cad tools nowadays work graphically, but the netlist is easier to work
with, especially if you want to insert a series component where
there wasn't one before. All you have to do is modify the numbering of
the points where the new component is placed, not redraw the
circuit to make the component physically fit.
There are cad tools that really need graphics: they are tools that model
the effects of proximity, radiation from the components, etc.
But an awful lot of design can be done without the picture.
msub t=60 e=4.2
freq=1.296
mlin 1 2 w=115 l=200
mlin 2 3 w=w1 l=l1
mlin 3 4 w=115 l=200
mlin 1 5 w=w1 l=l1
mlin 5 6 w=115 l=200
res 3 5 r=100
(In real life, the line junctions would have bends modeled in; I omitted
them for simplicity.)
--doug
--
Blessed are the peacemakers...for they shall be shot at from both sides. A.M.
Greeley
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