Looking Through Old Quanta Magazines 1996

Some interesting gems.

There was a request for a CTRL D function in QDOS to permit reverse stepping through programs in the opposite direction to CTRL C. Did this ever get made? In theory it should not be too difficult to make a DIY version of this. A background task/thing to sniff the keyboard queue, a quick examination of the jobs list and pick the job above the current job in the list or should it be below. Anyway why bother as the pick menu of QPAC2 lets you go directly to the desired job. Here in QLHeaven CTRL C is only used rarely.

Next a JAVA steering committee was set up consisting of John Hall, Dave Walker, Jonathan Hudson and Joachim van der Auwera. Did anything come of this committee? Perhaps JAVA grew too complex to port to a QL.

PROGs announced a SBASIC interface to ProWesS, this was interesting as earlier one of the doyens to programming had denounced ProWesS as too complex and C based to ever interface to SBASIC.

Buttons without QPAC2 was the title of another article. The author had found a small extension from Ralf Biedermann that created buttons without the button frame anywhere on the screen. That is something that interests us here. So far searches have only found Ralf Biedermann's archiver program in the online PD libraries. If anyone knows where it can be found please let QLHeaven know.

Serial connections were then also a topic with an article Mark J Swift and Simon N Goodwin, "How to connect almost anything", if only it were that easy. This topic has never gone away as the QL Forum shows.