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Sometime in 1988 I was fortunate to work with another person who was interested in computing and decided that the time had come when my section, at work, should introduce computerised records and procedures. He knew a little about computers, I had never seen one. We drew up a proposal for Management which included a five year plan. Eventually we got a second hand PC, it was an XT which meant something like extra technology! It had a hard disk of about five megabytes and 640K of Ram and the operating system was DOS 3.00. Shortly after getting going on this machine my colleague was transferred to another section and I was left on my own. So Eamonn, if you read this many thanks for introducing me to what has become another very intriguing hobby requiring hours of study to keep my old grey cells vibrating!
Nobody else showed any interest in it, his replacement certainly did not. I have recollections of trying to figure out what a batch file was. I was sure that such files could do wonders for me. I kept on reading and experimenting and eventually succeeded in writing one. It may not have worked the first time but it did
eventually work. This does not sound so amazing at this remove but I was using a text editor, which was part of DOS 3.00 and was called Edlin. If you don't know what Edlin was you are lucky. It was the most awkward thing to use and I had difficulty in remembering the commands which made editing my experimental batch files rather tiresome. I worked away on my own and eventually graduated to a 286 PC with a 40Mb hard disk. Didn't know why anyone would want a HD with such a capacity! This machine had DOS 3.2 so I was advancing. DOS 4.0 came and went, I never used
it and the general view at the time was not to use it, I don't know anyone who did. Apparently it was rather 'immature' and was released long before it had been fully tested and debugged.
Eventually I read that DOS 5.00 was coming on the market and that it had a replacement for Edlin. I eventually got that version of DOS and what a joy it was to have a
userfriendly text editor. Eventually I graduated to DOS 6.00 and then DOS 6.20 and very quickly this was replaced by DOS 6.22 which I used until the Windows operating systems started. Of course they were not 'operating' systems in the true sense of the word when they started. I must confess that I really enjoyed my learning during those years since 1988 and became a rather handy user of DOS. In fact I still use DOS a lot rather than use my 'Explore' program in Windows 98. Perhaps I am a slow adopter of new technology. As for batch files, I still write batch files for fun. They eventually lead me to dBase programming which I really enjoyed. The one thing that really helped me through all those years of learning was that I was able to touch type. This was a boon when writing programs as I could concentrate on the code and the information just flowed from my grey cells to the computer. I would advise anyone who does not touch type correctly, or at all, to learn to do so. I think that all school goers should be taught it, as we are now in an age when most of us interface with computers through the QWERTY keyboard.
I don't claim to be an expert at creating web pages or sites but I have had a lot of fun in setting up my own and in keeping it updated. As I see it there are three distinct problems in getting started. First you must think through what you will use your web presence for, you can always expand on this once you get started. The second thing to do is to convert it into the 'language' of the world wide web, there are a number of ways of doing this. The third thing to do is to get a host for your web presence. Usually your ISP will provide you with this facility and without any charge while your web site is for personal use and not a 'commercial' venture.
My advice in making a start is to have a look at a number of 'personal' web sites. See what these people are doing or trying to do and concentrate on one that interests you and that looks well. Then it may be a good idea to print this to allow you to peruse it at your leisure and to add notes or edit it with pencil or pen to try to nudge it into something that would more represent you. This is the most difficult part of the entire exercise. Before going any farther have a good look at this website. It may not be the greatest and it may not suit your requirements but I have endeavoured, using a few techniques, to make the site and all the pages of it accessible. Moving around in a site is called navigating and it is important to get this aspect working correctly. If you tempt a visitor to another page you must allow them to leave that page easily whether they want to go back or to go forward to another page linked from that page. I am quite pleased with my effort and with regular 'tweaks' it may get better. Have a look at another site that I have had some input into. It is that of the Warplane Research Group of Ireland. Quite good navigation there I think. Tim Spriddell has a personal website and he arranges his 'navigation' in similar fashion to my site. Have a look then at Joe O'Brien's academic web site. This site is crammed full of fully researched articles and is an excellent and valuable source of reference to students of history. The site is mostly text based and differs from mine in that respect. It is worth visiting if only to see another type of lay out. More recently I have visited the website of an old colleague of mine. This site is different again in that its main thrust is genealogy and the family history of the Chalmers Family in particular. Have a look at it, for anyone interested in genealogy it is an interesting site as it shows how that subject can be shown and Declan tells me that he has had many very useful contacts from visitors to it. In fact his 'family' has grown through contacts from the site.
Deirdre Scholar, from Santa Cruz, visited us recently. She is a niece of Thérèse's and she told me that she recently set up a website. I asked her to email me the URL of it when she returned to California and she said that she would. She has not yet returned so I tried a search for her name in Google and was amazed that the very first website found was hers. This is something that makes me envious. I must do some alterations to my own website to make it more visible to 'web crawlers'. In the mean time do have a look at Deirdre's site by clicking on her name.
But back to your 'start up' page. It will consist of a 'heading' and then the 'body' of the page. If your name is John Smith your page should indicate who you are at the outset. Eventually people will find your page from a search or a link from another persons page and your page must stand out as being distinctly yours. So John Smith may have as the heading to his page something like 'John Smith's Personal Website' or it could be 'Smith's Place' or some such variant of the name Smith. Having decided on your heading you must then concentrate on what the 'body' of the page will contain. While publishing a web page is like writing your autobiography in that it exposes you to the world at large most of us realise that, to others, we are boring and have rather dull existences. Having said that we all probably have some interesting pastime or hobby or can relate an interesting tale of something that happened to us. For the purposes of showing how a site can develop lets say that you just list your personal interests. They could be lake fishing, doing crosswords and growing chrysanthemums. Keeping it very simple you could finish off this first page by putting in the date that the page was created or/and updated. If you would like a visitor to your site to contact you you could include your email address too.
You may feel at this point that you are struggling and that it is all just too much bother but read what you have done and think about it. You have given as your personal interests three headings. Each of these can be the subject of a separate page and you can 'link' to them from your first page. When you have written these three pages you then have a website of four pages and you are only starting. That is how it grows. You now have your first design of your web site and now you must get down to presenting it in a form that the world wide web can recognise and this is where HTML and other 'things' come in.
The route I took was doing it from 'scratch' as I wanted to learn how to do it as I went along. The 'language' used in creating web pages is called HTML at its most basic. This is an acronym for 'Hyper Text Mark up Language'. Don't burden yourself by trying to understand what that means, it is just HTML to me. If you get familiar with the elements of that you are half ways there. The next problem is to get your pages 'published'. At its easiest this is a matter of going to a web hosting facility such as Yahoo, Eircom or Geocities. There are many who do this free for the amateur or private individual who just wants a personal site and who are not going to 'make money from it'. Such hosting organisations usually give about 15 Mbs of space on their server and this is more than adequate for the average personal website. For example, if you have explored my site you will realise that there are many pages, numerous photographs and apart from content there is a lot of reading in it. My entire site at the moment takes up about 13.5 Mbs, getting a bit close to what I have been allocated so I must start thinking about how best to get additional space. Your ISP or Internet service provider also provide space on their servers for your website. check it out, give it a try and you will be glad you did. Expanding on your site and updating it can be a 'new' hobby and is something that you can be planning while you are out walking or pottering in the potting shed. You can change it as often as you wish and the more often you add to it or change it the more interesting it becomes for your 'viewers'.
A project that I am currently researching is to network my laptop with my desktop PC. Anyone that I have asked don't have a simple solution and to date I don't know how to even get started. I am slow to use cables as wiring, power supplies and cables are the scourge of PCs and peripherals and televisions and sound systems. Infra red connections or wireless are the preferred options and I think that wireless is the more satisfactory. If you can give me any help in these matters please do. If and when I have any success I will be writing about it here. My aim is to have my desktop PC running in my 'shack' and to be able to boot up my laptop from anywhere in the house or garden and access all my files and send and receive emails remotely. I don't think that I am expecting too much.
Just the other day I got a 3Com 11 Mbps Wireless LAN Office Connect PC Card. It was surplus to someone's requirements. I went to the 3Com website and downloaded the appropriate driver and then put the card in my laptop and installed the driver only to be told that I need ActivSync 3.5 or later. I have tried a couple of times to download this but have failed. I suspect that there is a problem with the 'donor' site as it downloads for a while and then I'm disconnected. I don't' have this problem with other sites, well not on a regular basis. I have asked someone with a broadband connection to download it for me. All going well that would seem to have my laptop wireless network 'ready'..
Here is a little gem of a 'tip' that you may not know about. If you venture on to other pages on this site, or in any other site, and want to go back to the previous page that you were at, just press the 'Backspace' button on your keyboard. Pressing it again will take you back another page and so on. You can also use the 'Back' button or the 'link' provided on the page. However, if you open a 'new' page from within a page this may not work, you will have to 'close' that page by clicking on the X in the top right hand corner of the page.
Another 'tip' that I find useful. If you are reading a webpage on the screen and the print is a bit too small or too large for you, you can enlarge or reduce it. Just click anywhere on the screen with your mouse; then hold down the Ctrl key and roll the roller button on your mouse. The screen text will get larger or smaller depending on the direction, forwards or backwards, that you roll the wheel. If you don't have a wheel mouse seriously consider getting one as the roller is most useful. I would not be without one.
Unfortunately webspace does not allow me to make too many utilities available to download but I feel that the Irish Language Fonts should be available as the 'old Irish script' that I first learned and still like should not be 'lost'. If you want some help using any of these files feel free to contact me by email, refer to the opening page to find how to contact me. and type your query.
From time to time I like to use an Irish font especially if I am writing in Irish. Unfortunately this will not show up on another PC unless the same font is installed on that machine too. Of course it works fine if I print out something and send it by 'snail' mail. If you want to have these fonts they are very small downloads and are available here. One is called 'Gaeilge' and is the font type used before 'Roman' lettering or 'An chló Romhanach' was used. This download is just 35Kbs in size and will download in an instant. Click on Gaeilge and unzip it and install it as you would any other font.
Another font you can download is called 'Sean Chló' or 'Old Type' and is the font type used before the 'Gaeilge' font above was used. I don't think I ever used this font at school but we certainly had Irish story books that used it. One very well known Irish school book was called 'Séadna'. This download is just 46Kbs in size and will download in an instant. Click on Sean Chló and unzip it and install it as you would any other font.
As I am at it I have another font of interest. This is a variant of the Gaeilge font and I think that you can actually get the dots over the consonants with it. Look at the Read Me file, it may explain how this is done. Click on Gaelach and unzip it and install it as you would any other font.
This font predates all fonts based on the 'Roman' alphabet. It is called Ogham and can be seen on ancient stones in various parts of the country. There is one very interesting stone near Galarus Oratory on the Dingle Peninsula. The stone is called the 'Alphabet Stone' as there is Roman script on it beside the older Ogham. It is possible that it was used as a teaching aid to instruct people in the use of the 'new' Roman lettering. Click on Ogham and unzip it and install it as you would any other font.
While I like flight simulation I don't consider that to be a game. From what I know of 'gamers' I could not be considered to be one of them. Having said that there are some games that I do play on my PC. These would include Tetris, Solitaire, Freecell, MsHearts; I used to play Taipei but I don't have that on my current PC. All of the foregoing, with the exception of Tetris, I would consider to be 'doodle' games to be played while I am on the phone or waiting for someone to call me back. I have dabbled with other games but would swiftly consider all of them to be rubbish. Having said all of that I do have two games that I consider to be great, really great and amazing when you consider that they were written in 1988 or thereabouts! One is Snooker with Alex Higgins. Other than having a sketch of the Great Alex on the opening screen there is no further reference to Alex. The program was written for the Amiga computer but works perfectly on old PCs. Unfortunately it does not run satisfactorily on Windows 2000 as the mouse driver required isn't available. The program is ideally a DOS program so the older the computer with 'real' DOS on it the better. It does work on Windows 98 and I am currently 'building' an old computer just to run this game. The game can be played against a competitor or as a practice game and the dynamics are superb. I have tried other three dimensional snooker/billiards games but they are no good although they do look well until you try to play them. Anyone interested in this game and who isn't running Windows 2000 or Windows XP can use it, just contact me and I will let you have details of how to get a copy of it.