Blog from Kanada

In 1979, i. e., when Apple II was used widely, a teacher of my high shool asked me to develope a program on Apple II. Because I wanted a program development tool, I developed a small-scale visual editor called BATE, which was written in Basic. I submitted an article on BATE to a magazine called I/O. The copyright of the article is probably owned by Kogaku-sha, but I believe it will not disturb their business by copying the article. So I put a copy here. (You can read the program list but I am sorry the article itself was written in Japanese.) If I submit an article now, I will use my real name, but I used a pen name then.

This program was my first practical program for a PC. With this editor, one can visually edit programs, i. e., one can change a text or a Basic program while looking at it. However, I had almost never used a good visual editor such as vi or emacs at that time. My favorite editor was the editor for Mitsubishi's mainframe computer called Melcom Cosmo 700. With this editor, we could edit a program while looking at about 25 lines, but it was basically a line editor. Because I mimicked this editor, one could edit a text by using commands such as "I" (Insert a line) or "C" (Change part of a line by using string matching).

I created my home page in 1994. I was attracted tp WWW and surfed around the Web space that was still small, and made a link collection from the collected information. These link collections are still connected to my home page.

I knew a link collection is an unstable thing. Linked pages would be lost one by one, and a link collection would loose its meanings. I made efforts on my pages no to loose its meanings. However, my Web site, which was originally in Rimnet, was damaged by a cracker and I had to change my URL. I thought it was the only way to avoid such trouble again to have my own domain. So, I moved all the pages to kanadas.com. Before that, I had to change the URLs of my pages, not only the pages in Rimnet.

The lower half of my Hub page (home page) consists of links to link collections. I created these link collections in 1995 to 1997. People who often used Web since then must be familiar with the contents of this entry, so they do not need to read it. At that time, search engines were not so useful as in today. I created the link collections mainly for my personal memorandum as written in my Hub page, but the reason why a memorandum was necessary was that it was difficult to find information that I once found by a search engine. After I started to use Google, I could find most of the information quickly again, so I did not feel writing memorandums necessary. Now we can easily take a memorandum everywhere by using a content managemnet system on Web, but at that time I had to Telnet to the Website and write HTML texts with tags by a text editor. Because it took much time to create the link collections, I cannot throw them away easily although most of the links are dead.

I am writing on crafting a microcomputer when I was in the first year of the university. When the Intel 8080 began to be sold at Akihabara, I wanted to build a microcomputer using the 8080. Although I had never developed a digital circuit, I bought a set of the AMD 9080, a second source of the 8080, and eight memory ICs (of 1 kbit), and I dared to wire the memory circuit using a soldering iron for analog circuits and with 1-mm vinyl cables and a universal circuit board. This wiring required much more efforts than I expected. It seemed to me a miracle when the microcomputer worked. But, anyway, I inputted a very short program using 16 address-input and 8 (8-bit) data-input toggle-switches, and ran the program. The result was displayed by the 8 LEDs. It took very much time to input a program by the toggle switches, so the microcomputer soon became unused after I ran only a few programs.

Until then, I had experiences to build hardwares, such as radios and stereo amplifiers, but I had almost never touched softwares. However, in contrast, after the above experience, I seldom touched hardware but often touched software. That was because the wiring of the microcomputer was so painful, and I decided not to build hardware. I can write that this decision led to myself of these years.

TBD. [... Text editors are powerful tools for programming and for creating contents. ...]