Airline Manager

      So, my first retrochallenge entry. Woot! Finally. I've not spent any time on
      this so far and I've already been derailed. Friend and fellow contestant
      Retrocosm managed to pull two BASIC program we wrote some time around the age of
      15 (which is around 28 years ago, ouch!) for a class project, possibly for our
      'O' levels. You can read about his process for extracting the BASIC programs
      from a 5.25" BBC Micro formatted floppy disk on his blog website[1].

      My recovered program is called 'Airline Manager'. It looks quite an impressive
      piece of BASIC[2] for me, at 15, to have written, but on closer inspection it
      becomes obvious that it is an unfinished project. Obviously this challenge comes
      at a pertinent time this year!

      

      So the current plan is to enhance the program to get it working. I'd like to get
      it running on SLAVE[3] my Alphaserver 1000A which runs OpenVMS. I'm going to do
      this via ALEPH which is a VAXstation 4000/VLC running as a remote clustered
      satellite. This enables me to use the VAX version of DEC BASIC which is
      interactive - when it was ported to the Alpha architecture the interactive mode
      was removed making it a straight compiler.

      I'm also in the process of testing that modem access to SLAVE still works
      correctly. The NEWUSER application (which allows online self-registration of
      OpenVMS accounts on SLAVE) has been updated. The long term goal would be to
      create a captive account on SLAVE to run Airline Manager.

      Wish me luck!






























































































































































































































































































































                
      1. Retrocosm's blog

      2. airman4.bas

      3. SLAVE via telnet