scredit2 - mainframe terminal emulator / News: Recent posts

My plans to implement MSU EDITOR mode in scredit2 have been postponed, partly to give me time to work on a PHP/MySQL project for a local environmental group.

There will be a reunion at Michigan State University of some of the Computer Laboratory old-timers on 29 Sept 2006, so it would be good if I had made a little progress on MSU EDITOR mode by then. But no promises.

I have a minimal scredit2 working, in dumb terminal mode only. You wouldn't want to actually use it instead of your usual terminal emulator, but at least it's a start. Textblocks are being allocated, populated, and reused as necessary. This is necessary work in preparation for MSU EDITOR mode, which is the raison d'être for scredit2.

scredit2 is being written in C++ for Windows. Its structure will closely follow that of the original SCREDIT, which was written in 8080 and 8086 assembly language.

My first thought was to write scredit2 in Java or C#, in order to make it more portable. (And also to make it more of a learning experience for me.) In fact, I started on such a project. But the magnitude of the project (SCREDIT was over 35,000 lines of code) convinced me to take the easy way out on this initial cut. Making the leap from very low-level code (no operating system!) all the way to a high-level, pointerless environment was rather daunting.... read more