The computer languages I have used on website
My first computer was a little Apple, running under APPLEDOS with Apple Basic supplied as the programing language. PCs at this time came with their Basic programs but these ran in interpretive mode with no compiler.

It was much later that I got a computer guru who told me that: "Anyone who learns Basic as his/her 1st language is maimed for life!"
TOO LATE!!

The company I was working for were writing in Microsoft QuickBasic3 (QB3) working under MSDos using ASCII symbols and providing a compiler. So I bought copies and started to program my professional work using them. Shortly afterwards I started to build this website.

My server, globalnet.co.uk gave me fantastic one-on-one support for which I cannot thank them too much. One piece of advice they gave me was to construct the site using files written in HTML. I went online and dumped a then current copy of: Kevin Werbach's "Barebones Guide to HTML" (Which I still have, & use). Thanks to Kevin I can handcrank a pretty concise page of HTML. Thanks to QB3 I can do this at the touch of a button. That's why I'm loath to accept the massive pages so often sent in by people using proprietary editing programs. If I have time I can normally reduce their length by a factor of 10 or 20 with attendant decrease in download times.!

At that date my access to the internet was by "dial-up". I soon decided that the front page should contain no photos or serious graphics. The website was to pass on files needed to run some 5 or 6 leagues so I wanted things to work like greased lightning. Colour and ASCII symbols must suffice -- hence the front page you know so well. OK -- the front page has lead to photoshoots taking ages to download at dial-up speeds, but they have always come with a warning!

Now I, like many of you, have wifi running at 20Mb/s. Great! But there are still some of you without the luxury of fibre-optics so it's still important to keep down the volume of downloads. There are now many object oriented programing languages well suited to constructing website pages but I don't speak them and can find no courses to help me update my capabilities. I have no idea as to the capabilities of these object oriented languages so I pass on some subroutines I have developed in the language I have.

But QB3 aint too bad! The compiler is good, the debugger adequate. OK, one can't pass records and I've defined the type of each variable by the suffix character (%,$ etc). But the names of variables in subroutines apply only within the subroutine (unless declared global)-- the names of variables passed to a subroutine may differ. In the examples of source code I give, I have deliberately kept the names passed to the subroutine the same as those within it. I have also been verbose in my choice of names to aid understanding of the subroutines which I have annotated thoroughly.

If anyone has a licence for MSQuickbasic I would be happy to supply working source -- otherwise please treat the source given as pseudo-code for the development of any needed programs.
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