Re: Addressing home-made adapter cards

[paw@bbs.ausom.oz.au (Peter Watson)]

dempson@atlantis.actrix.gen.nz (David Empson) writes:

>In article <3b9m6m$29rn@seminole.gate.net>,
>Steve Reeves <stever@gate.net> wrote:
>>
>> Mike Westerfield mentioned on GEnie that he was trying to get
>> permission from Apple to reprint the toolbox refs.
>
>That would be good.
>
>> I would like to see an update to that old Addison-Wesley electronic
>> reference (what was it called, Programmer's Companion?).
>
>Programmer's Online Companion.  The first reference I can find to it
>in old APDAlogs is Winter 1989.  The price then was $49.95, and it
>didn't sound like it did much.  It was described as a CDA that takes
>150k of memory and saves you having to type in toolbox calls.  It
>didn't say anything about _documenting_ the calls.

The Programmer's Online Companion was actually quite a clever and workable
idea. It didn't load its database until invoked for the first time, and
marked it as purgeable on exit. If you had the memory, it would stay around.
If not, away it went!

It _did_ include documentation of the calls, albeit in limited detail.

The cut and paste feature worked, but I usually used it just as a reference.

It's biggest problem was simply that as far as I can tell the first version
was the last. It's drastically out of date, but it's still occasionally
useful, so I still have it in my CDA list.

An update wouldn't be all that dramatic as the database "compiler" was
included, if I remember rightly.

>I think a CDA is probably the best way to source on-line
>documentation, since most programming tools run in text mode and
>aren't in an environment that allows easy application switching.  The
>CDA would have to access a disk file containing the documentation - no
>way do I want a large amount of precious RAM wasted on large indexes
>and/or text.  (It is bad enough having both Nifty List and GSBug
>keeping a full list of toolbox call names in memory.)

Nifty List can be set to have it's database purgeable as well!
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