Chương 33: Book 2 - Chapter 7 A

School went well. I requested to test out of several classes, which eased my initial workload. Considering I was the only student in the entire University who had a perfect 36 on my ACT test and it was part of my agreement with Dr Thompson, there wasn't much pushback. Especially after I got a perfect score on the first two finals. When I wasn't in class, I was either in the student union or the library. My testing out left Tuesdays and Thursdays free, so I spent them on software development at home.

I was so excited when Mr Gordon called.

"Hello Mr Cook! Your computer has arrived."

"Thank you!" I said excitedly.

"Did everything else I ordered come too?"

"It did," he confirmed.

"Thank you, I'll be there as quickly as I can." I could hear his laugh as I hung up. I banged on Matt's door and he opened it curiously. Tuesdays were practically days off for him.

"Mr Gordon called. We need to get there right away."

"Okay," he said, seeing my excitement.

"I need five minutes." Then he shut the door. I was impatiently waiting at the elevator holding it open with one hand when he finally showed up. It was just a ten minute drive to the computer shop. Soon the van was loaded with the machine and all the extra parts I had ordered.

"Wow, traffic is bad today. It's going to take hours to get home," Matt teased.

"Take your time, Matt. I'll never forget this moment. It'll be with me forever," I warned darkly, to which he laughed. My new IBM computer arrived upstairs on a luggage cart with all its many peripherals: a 360KB external 5. 25" drive, an external modem, a combo I/O card, a two button mouse, an 84 key keyboard and a new 10MB Seagate ST-412 hard drive. Internally and built in, the 286 had 640KB of RAM, the mathematics coprocessor, a CGA video card, a huge internal 1. 2MB 5.

25" drive and a monster 20 megabyte hard drive that would be dead in a few weeks. When I first opened up the machine, I had to remove all the connected parts so I could get to the motherboard for two important tasks. The first was removing the 12MHz crystal and replacing it with a 16MHz crystal from RadioShack. This would boost the processor from 6 to 8 MHz. The second delicate surgery was to replace the BIOS EPROM chip. Mr Gordon had the chips in stock and an EPROM programmer.

Using a file I wrote, he programmed it for me. It had been sitting in a sealed box waiting for installation. Putting it in changed the BIOS that ran the machine. The new BIOS allowed you to manually set the drive type, whether it was a 3. 5-inch or a 5. 25-inch and what the capacity of the drive was. This fixed the problem the PC had of not knowing the correct capacity of the floppy drive attached. Of course there was no 3. 5-inch drive available yet, but I was ready for when it showed up next year.

Once that was done I started reinstalling almost everything. The hard drive got replaced with the new Seagate drive. Then I examined the 8 empty slots. It had two 8-bit slots and six 16-bit ISA slots. First I returned the CGA video card to the 8-bit slot it had been in. Then I added a card in the remaining 8-bit slot. The card was an I/O combo card. It gave me one printer port and one serial port. Next came the drive controller card taking the first 16-bit slot.

I screwed in the new hard drive and put the disk drive back in place. Then I reconnected the power cables for the two drives and finally connected the data ribbon back to the controller card. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. I then carefully connected a new plug to the drive controller card. The thin-wired ribbon was for a new plug just for an external floppy.

I had to use a screwdriver to open the precut hole for that plug in the back of the case and screw it into place. Then I reinstalled the extra RAM, all 128KB of it, giving me 640KB in total, which took up one 16-bit slot. Four of my eight slots were taken. In the next few months I would be opening it back up to add RAM and a better video card. I closed it back up and plugged the external modem into the serial port of the combo card, twisting the finger-tightened screw knobs that held it in place.

I did the same with the external disk drive using the new plug for it on the back of the computer case. I unboxed the new printer, an Epson LQ-1500, which I plugged into the new printer port on the combo card. Then I realized I didn't have any more power plugs and had to leave the modem and the printer unplugged. Once I had it set up, the new drive had to be partitioned and formatted. Then I had to install PC-DOS on it and reboot.

With the computer running and no fear of it dying suddenly from hard drive failure, I inserted and copied Object Pascal for DOS to the hard drive. Once copied to the hard drive I used it to write a patch for the buggy FAT system in DOS. The FAT algorithm had an implementation with several bugs that wasted space and problems with cluster size and sector numbering. Object Pascal does an excellent job of writing programs that can patch other programs. That's also useful for writing a computer virus.

It took about an hour to write the patch for PC-DOS that fixed the algorithm. Once it was patched, I had to delete the partition and reformat the drive with the new algorithm. Once the drive was ready, I reinstalled the fixed DOS 3. 0 and reinstalled Object Pascal for DOS. I need to write a fix for the CMI hard drive. They were the initial supplier for the Intel 80286 derived IBM PC/AT, with their 20MB hard drive. The fatal error that would have killed my drive was present in every single drive they shipped.

A number of them also had some faulty hardware. It took nearly 5, 000 lines of assembly language code for new firmware for the hard drive. The code couldn't fix the hardware flaws but the code would solve most of their problems. Unfortunately it did nothing for me, as the firmware was not something that could be updated. It was on a ROM chip and not something I could remove or reprogram, unlike the BIOS. I packaged both solutions, put them in an envelope and included a letter explaining what I had done.

I wrote Jennifer Parz's address on the next-day envelope. She would contact IBM, CMI and possibly Microsoft to negotiate for my fixes. I had included a note that I could write a much faster File Allocation Table that could be used for drives larger than 512MB if Microsoft or IBM was interested. With that done, I had the fastest and best 286 on the planet. I then upgraded my compiler, editing Object Pascal's graphic engine to fully utilize every bit of power and color available in the standard CGA card.

With that finally complete, I was able to port Civilization to IBM compatible computers running DOS with at least 256KB of RAM and full CGA color video cards. I then had to port ArtStudio to the IBM machine. Once I had a color version of ArtStudio I could redraw all the artwork for Civilization game. The game still pulled the artwork from the same directory, so I simply replaced the grayscale pictures with the new color pictures. All of that was several weeks worth of work.

When I was finished I dropped the source code and a disk with the color artwork in the next-day envelope for Heartland. I paused to consider for a moment. I added the modified DOS too and the BIOS upgrade. I took a few minutes more to write a letter on the Mac to explain what everything was. As it was printing I realized I need to add one more thing and wrote out the instructions on how to 'overclock' the machine from 6 to 8 MHz.

This was just the first of constant upgrades the machine would get until I replaced it with a 386 in two years. In October my RAM upgrade arrived. I picked it up on the way home from the University. Opening the computer up, I removed the 128KB RAM card. In its place I installed a 512KB RAM card. Then I added three more. This brought the installed RAM up to 2. 5MB. Unfortunately DOS and the system hardware would not let me easily use it. I had one 16-bit slot left open for when the new EGA video card arrived.

I edited the CONFIG. SYS file. Using the DOS VDISK. SYS, it would create 1. 5MB of space as a virtual disk in the new RAM. It created the equivalent of a small but super-speedy hard drive. I adjusted my programming tools to use the space and tested compiling a color version of the typing program, Alphabet Invasion. With no need to swap disks and the super speedy 1. 5MB mini-drive it tore through the code, compiling it in minutes instead of hours.

I did a little dance of joy as the computer beeped to tell me it had finished. In November my EGA graphics card arrived, so I pulled out the CGA card from the 8-bit slot and placed the EGA card in the last 16-bit slot I had available. Then I connected the new monitor to the card. Mom came in while I was working to tell me dinner was ready.