C/C++ Users Journal, Illustrated C

I wrote regular articles (a mini-column, sort of) for The C/C++ Users Journal during my tenure at R&D Publications in Lawrence, KS. The very first book published by R&D Books, Illustrated C, was a collection of those columns. The Table of Contents corresponds to the articles:

My CUJ article describing the Freeware STL Error Message Decryptor I wrote to demystify those lengthy STL-related C++ error messages, appears in the July, 2001 issue.

My last article for CUJ, Thinking in STL: You Know It Don't Come Easyappeared in the January, 2003 issue. This is the story of the slow transformation of a "C string"-based function template into one using STL strings exclusively.

SysAdmin Magazine

SysAdmin was launched by R&D Publications while I was on the technical staff. One of my favorite roles as tech staff member was administering the SCO Xenix box that ran the company, typically via shell script programming. Several of my administrative scripts ended up fodder for SysAdmin articles. These articles were published between May, 1992 and December, 1993:

Windows Developer's Journal

When R&D launched The Windows Developers Journal circa 1991, I was asked to take the helm of the "Tech Tips" column and remained the Tech Tips editor until 1998.

Ancient History (or, "BDS C and the Good Ole' CP/M Days")

BDS C information and download links have now moved to the BDS C Home Page.

Really Ancient History (or, "The Wild Pre-CP/M 8080 Days")

"A Tiny Basic Extension Package" (Article in the June/July 1978 issue of Dr. Dobbs' Journal): A fellow named Li-Chen Wang wrote a nifty little Tiny Basic interpreter that ran on my IMSAI 8080 (with its whopping 4K of RAM...if you don't count the 1K on the VDM-1 video board for screen memory, which I actually programmed in until being able to afford the 4K RAM board...). Unfortunately, after you keyed in your program and ran it, there was no way to save it. So, I wrote a set of commands that worked within Tiny Basic to save and load programs from mass storage (being, in this case, the Tarbell Cassette Interface mated to a JC Penney $40 cassette recorder--for which the Tarbell interface seemed to have been optimized.)

"A Machine-Code Relocator for the 8080" (Article in BYTE Magazine, July 1977). My first computer magazine publication. Back before we even had assemblers, moving code around in memory was a real pain. This little program detected addresses within machine language instructions and offset them all by some constant value, essentially doing an on-the-fly relocation of absolute machine instructions. This was actually a useful thing at the time.