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Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other

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In message <bl5jfoFnaaU1@mid.individual.net> 
  Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> wrote:
> On 2014-02-01, Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> wrote:
>> In message <bl4o0eFpmdpU1@mid.individual.net> 
>>   Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> wrote:
>>> On 2014-02-01, Alan Browne <alan.browne@FreelunchVideotron.ca> wrote:
>>>> On 2014.01.30, 08:13 , Lewis wrote:
>>>>> In message <300120140958183018%timstreater@greenbee.net>
>>>>>    Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote:
>>>>>> In article <-u2dnf2PD4kFLHTPnZ2dnUVZ_vqdnZ2d@giganews.com>, Alan Browne
>>>>>> <alan.browne@FreelunchVideotron.ca> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> More than 20 years ago it was pretty easy to connect a number of Macs
>>>>>> on a LAN using AppleTalk. I don't know what the nameless one is
>>>>>> bleating about.
>>>>>
>>>>> Hell, you could easily network the original Mac 128K. Just plug it in to
>>>>> a chain of other Macs and VOILA! a LAN appeared as if by magic.
>>>>
>>>> I was a member of the other faith at the time.
>>
>>> I was still doing Basic/Zilog Assembly programming on TRS-80s back then
>>> and the experience of using Apple's LocalTalk networking on Macs was
>>> magical compared with other networking solutions available for other
>>> platforms at the time.
>>
>> I remember hand wiring a serial cable to connect a computer to the other
>> using... damn, I don't remember how we got them to 'talk'.  All you
>> could do was type on one screen and see it on the other, but if you had
>> two people trying to talk it was garbled. Even that was magic.  Of
>> course, this was before any of us ever heard of the Internet or
>> modems.

>: )

> I have fond memories of assembly language programming with a limited set
> of registers etc, rebuilding TRS-DOS diskette directories by hand in
> hexadecimal, repairing crappy disk drives by hand with a solder gun.
> I feel those of us who learned computing and programming in those days
> are actually pretty lucky, because it allowed us to gain a rudimentary
> understanding of how things work that is harder to attain today,

But to be clear, I have no desire to go back to those days. I like the
tools I have now and the fact that freaking *everything* is on the
Internet and that I can find the answer to a question in minutes so I
can keep working instead of in days (or weeks, or never) which was so
often the case 30 years ago.

Just the other day I thought I would take a stab at redoing a header
logo on a blog in HTML canvas instead of the old png I'd made by hand
several years ago. It was just a text logo, nothing terribly fancy, a
drop shadow, a little tweak to the kerning, but it was this big blob of
an image and it didn't scale down well.

There were some issues with getting started though. First, I'd never
written a single line of javascript. Second, I'd never even looked at
the spec for HTML5 canvas element. Third, I had no idea if what I wanted
to do was even possible, but I was pretty sure it was. Fourth, Wordpress
has always been a thing I setup for someone and then walk away. What I
wanted to do required getting into the php/html code and not just
playing with the GUI (although, maybe I could have done some of it via
the GUI, not sure).

But, after a few hours I had what I wanted, a HTML canvas with the text
I wanted and the shadow and it looked pretty much exactly like the png
logo.

Then I got going and did some other stuff. I ended up writing three
functions, one to draw a graphic logo in the canvas, one to put text in
the canvas (accepting several passed variables like the text, the base
size, the primary color, the secondary color, and an array of letters to
put in the secondary color. I wrote a little subroutine that pulled the
kerning in on the punctuation characters even.

And I say this not to brag about my 1337 hax0rz skillz with the HTML5,
but rather that I would never have dove into this if I didn't have that
1980s foundation of "we'll just try it until something works."
Javascript? Dead simple to write, and not very different than C or php.
Canvas elements? Well, they're a little odd and I'm not sure IO
understand exactly how the y axis works in them, but I got the values
that worked by fiddling with it in BBEdit. And that's what I see a lot
of people don't do is just try things. Everyone, from the neophyte user
to the 'experienced' programmer under 30 seems to have a attitude that
if they don't get it just right, everything will go to hell and the
Internet will explode.

On the other hand, I spent about 15 minutes trying to add an alpha
channel to a jpeg file, so you know, still stupid. :)

I ended up, though, with a stand-alone javascript file that has my
functions and I will be able to reuse that in a bunch of other pages
and while I will probably continue to tweak them and I'm under no
illusions that the code is necessarily good (or 'good') it all works.

The equivilant sort of task in 1987 would have taken many posts to
various USENET groups, several days while those posts propagated and
replies came in, and going to the library and finding books (which were
probably checked out anyway).

-- 
'Winners never talk about glorious victories. That's because they're the
ones who see what the battlefield looks like afterwards. It's only the
losers who have glorious victories.' --Small Gods

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Thread

Getting two computers to talk to each other David Downing <david.h.downing@gmail.com> - 2014-01-29 10:45 -0800
  Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2014-01-29 18:50 +0000
  Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2014-01-30 08:58 +1300
    Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2014-01-29 14:59 -0500
    Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Alan Browne <alan.browne@FreelunchVideotron.ca> - 2014-01-29 18:49 -0500
      Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2014-01-30 13:24 +1300
        Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Alan Browne <alan.browne@FreelunchVideotron.ca> - 2014-01-29 20:57 -0500
          Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-01-30 09:58 +0000
            Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2014-01-30 13:13 +0000
              Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2014-01-30 15:01 +0000
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2014-01-30 21:06 +0000
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Wilbur Eleven <wil@nowhere.at.all.ru.ca.fr.uk.us> - 2014-01-30 16:57 -0500
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2014-01-30 17:05 -0500
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Don Bruder <dakidd@sonic.net> - 2014-01-30 14:12 -0800
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2014-01-30 22:02 +0000
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Wilbur Eleven <wil@nowhere.at.all.ru.ca.fr.uk.us> - 2014-01-30 17:51 -0500
              Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Alan Browne <alan.browne@FreelunchVideotron.ca> - 2014-02-01 12:02 -0500
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2014-02-01 17:08 +0000
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2014-02-01 23:03 +0000
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2014-02-02 00:57 +0000
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Ted Lee <tmplee@gmail.com> - 2014-02-01 21:23 -0600
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2014-02-02 04:54 +0000
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Alan Browne <alan.browne@FreelunchVideotron.ca> - 2014-02-02 09:29 -0500
            Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2014-01-31 08:58 +1300
              Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-01-30 21:13 +0000
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Michael Vilain <vilain@NOspamcop.net> - 2014-01-30 13:53 -0800
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-01-30 22:09 +0000
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Michael Vilain <vilain@NOspamcop.net> - 2014-01-30 22:40 -0800
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2014-01-31 12:41 +0000
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2014-01-31 13:39 +1300
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-01-31 08:27 +0000
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2014-02-01 09:45 +1300
                Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-01-31 22:33 +0000
              Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-02-10 01:15 +0100
      Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2014-01-30 13:24 +1300
        Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2014-01-30 02:49 +0000
          Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-02-10 01:22 +0100
            Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2014-02-10 00:55 +0000
        Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Alan Browne <alan.browne@FreelunchVideotron.ca> - 2014-02-01 12:02 -0500
    Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other ErikRS <mac-dane@is.invalid> - 2014-01-30 02:45 +0100
      Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Warren Oates <warren.oates@gmail.com> - 2014-01-30 12:30 -0500
  Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Warren Oates <warren.oates@gmail.com> - 2014-01-29 18:18 -0500
  Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Alan Browne <alan.browne@FreelunchVideotron.ca> - 2014-01-29 18:54 -0500
    Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2014-01-30 02:53 +0000
      Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Gary <gary_w1@hotmail.com> - 2014-01-30 03:44 -0500
      Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-01-30 10:00 +0000
        Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2014-01-30 14:59 +0000
        Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2014-01-31 09:02 +1300
      Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Warren Oates <warren.oates@gmail.com> - 2014-01-30 12:32 -0500
        Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Michael Vilain <vilain@NOspamcop.net> - 2014-01-30 12:26 -0800
          Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-02-10 01:30 +0100
      Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other John <Man@the.keyboard> - 2014-01-31 00:49 +0000
        Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2014-01-31 03:55 +0000
        Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2014-01-31 18:25 +1300
  Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Suze <replytome@thenewsgroup.com> - 2014-01-30 20:02 -0600
    Re: Getting two computers to talk to each other Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2014-01-31 18:27 +1300

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