Educational Technology Center DOS development environment

This is a rough description of the current (June 1994) development envrionment at the centre, built around Turbo Pascal, and closely connected to the ICS department's UNIX network, and thence to the Internet. Future work, however, is likely to change the balance from the current arrangement:

Currently we run directly under DOS 3.3 or 5.0 (3.1 for machines booting from 5.25"), with the assistance of Norton Commander for speeding up most file operations.
Working sources are kept in DOS directories either on the local machine, or on the remote drivies shared across the network.
Although some machines use either 386Max or Quarterdeck QEMM to optimise memory usage and to provide management of extended and expanded memory, no DOS extension or 32-bit support is used.

Programmer-support units for DOS

These are support units and tools derived from (and in some cases extended) the original versions under the p-System, in UCSD Pascal.

Programmer information for DOS

In general, definitive programmer information is harder to get for DOS than for the p-System. Much that is fundamental is not definitively documented. However, some very valuable sources exist, including:

interrup.lst.Z an immense, but valuable, listing of the functions that have been attached to the 80*86 interrupt vector for calling as software interrupts, by Microsoft, IBM, and a broad variety of software vendors, with varying degrees of standardisation. Includes the functionalities under the major DOS software interrupts, notably number 21H, and the BIOS video software interrupt, number 10H.
* CAUTION! almost 1 megabyte -even when compressed-!*

Multilingual support software for DOS dialogues

Making the dialogues portable not only across machines and operating systems, but across different natural languages, has been a goal for many years. The principal documentation on creating and maintaining multilingual dialogues is kept at the University of Geneva, where the great majority of the work on multilingual adaptation of dialogues has been done.

MS Windows, OS/2, et al.

Little has been done to move into these environments, partly because of the very restricted machine resources ETC has been obliged to maintain. Rudimentary installations of Windows 3.0 and/or 3.1 exist on a couple of the machines, but they have been of limited use. Initial serious exploration has now started (June 1994) with a project to convert parts of the Scientific Reasoning series to voice input, since the support software used for it requires not only Windows or OS/2, but much more current levels of hardware resources.

DOS (and Microsoft Windows) programs

MSKERM2.30-DOC (compressed) is a user's manual for the DOS version of Kermit (an outdated version by now) which is not only a very useful program for transferring files, but a very respectable terminal emulator.

Educational Technology Center,
Department of Information and Computer Science,
University of California, Irvine
Irvine CA 92717-3425