This is a program that I wrote many years ago. It is a floppy disk , disk copy,disk info,and format program. All written in masm assembler. There is also a small 252 byte driver that allows nonstandard floppy formats on dos systems below 7.0. Floppies can be formatted in any track and sector layout. 1.44M floppies can be formatted to 1.76 M. All source code,includes and libraries are included. Modify the bld.bat file to your own needs.
There are many asm tricks in the source code.
Have fun with this old code.
Like many of my colleagues in this industry, I learned Windows programming from Charles Petzold s Programming Windows—a classic programming text that is the bible to an entire generation of Windows programmers. When I set out to become an MFC programmer in 1994, I went shopping for an MFC equivalent to Programming Windows. After searching in vain for such a book and spending a year learning MFC the old-fashioned way, I decided to write one myself. It s the book you hold in your hands. And it s the book I would like to have had when I was learning to program Windows the MFC way.
It is commonly accepted today that optical fiber communications have revolutionized
telecommunications. Indeed, dramatic changes have been induced in the way we interact
with our relatives, friends, and colleagues: we retrieve information, we entertain and
educate ourselves, we buy and sell, we organize our activities, and so on, in a long list
of activities. Optical fiber systems initially allowed for a significant curb in the cost of
transmission and later on they sparked the process of a major rethinking regarding some,
generation-old, telecommunication concepts like the (OSI)-layer definition, the lack of
cross-layer dependency, the oversegmentation and overfragmentation of telecommunica-
tions networks, and so on.
We were on the lookout for ice.
I was in a 32 foot sailing yacht with writer and explorer Tristan Gooley, undertaking a
double-handed sail from Scotland through the Faroes up to 66 33 45.7 N and the midnight
sun. Now sailing out of the Arctic Circle we were approaching Iceland from the north, heading
for the Denmark Straits, where ice flowed south. The Admiralty Pilot warned of bergs but the
ice charts we had sailed with were over a week old. We needed an update.
The idea for this book was born during one of my project-related trips to the beautiful city
of Hangzhou in China, where in the role of Chief Architect I had to guide a team of very
young, very smart and extremely dedicated software developers and verification engineers.
Soon it became clear that as eager as the team was to jump into the coding, it did not have
any experience in system architecture and design and if I did not want to spend all my time in
constant travel between San Francisco and Hangzhou, the only option was to groom a number
of local junior architects. Logically, one of the first questions being asked by these carefully
selected future architects was whether I could recommend a book or other learning material
that could speed up the learning cycle. I could not. Of course, there were many books on
various related topics, but many of them were too old and most of the updated information
was either somewhere on the Internet dispersed between many sites and online magazines, or
buried in my brain along with many years of experience of system architecture.
In Helsinki during a visiting lecture, an internationally well-known professor in communica-
tionssaid,‘Inthecommunicationssocietywehavemanagedtoconvertourproposalsandideas
to real products, not like in the control engineering society. They have very nice papers and
strong mathematics but most of the real systems still use the old PID controllers!’. As our
background is mainly in control as well as communications engineering, we know that this
thought is not very accurate. We agree that most of the practical controllers are analog and
digital PID controllers, simply because they are very reliable and able to achieve the required
control goals successfully. Most of the controllers can be explained in terms of PID. The
reasons behind this impressive performance of PID will be explained in Chapter 2.
Wirelesscommunications,especiallyinitsmobileform,hasbroughtusthefreedomofmobility
andhaschangedthelifestylesofmodernpeople.Waitingatafixedlocationtoreceiveormakea
phone call, or sitting in front of a personal computer to send an e-mail or download a video
program, has become an old story. Nowadays it is commonplace for people to talk over a cell
phonewhilewalkingonthestreet,ortodownloadandwatchamoviewhiletravelingonatrain.
Thisisthebenefitmadeavailabletousbythesuccessfulevolutionofwirelesscommunications
over three generations, with the fourth generation being under way.
There’s a story (it’s either an old vaudeville joke
or a Zen koan) in which a fisherman asks a fish,
“What’s the water like down there?” and the
fish replies “What is water?” If the story is just
a joke, the point is to make us laugh; but if it’s
a koan, the point is that the most obvious and
ubiquitous parts of our immediate environ-
ment are, paradoxically, often the easiest to
overlook.
