Re: Re Keystrokes: Possible BIOS compatibility

["Patricia M. Godfrey" PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx]

J. R. Fox wrote:
> A "real", contemporary, and reasonably capable OS -- and I'm afraid
this would have to include W2K or XP -- should provide major resistance
to a crashing program being able to bring down the whole works. Such
cases should be very few and far between.>
I don't think I have to say that I'm no apologist for Micro$oft (and a
typo there nearly gave us another variant: Miscrosoft--as in Miscreant),
but if an aberrent app overwites certain addressess in RAM, nothing will
prevent a reboot. Nothing SHOULD write to those addressess, but in the
late DOS era they were frequently unused, and a lot of apps sneaked in
there to get a few extra K. I once used a dBase III clone that made very
efficient use of RAM--up through the 286. Came the 386 and real
protected mode, and the program was unusable; caused spontaneous reboots
whenever it was loaded. And this was under either DrDOS 6 or Novell
7--no Microsludge involved.

Robert Holmgren wrote:

> This works on all 5 of your "misbehaving" computers, right?
>
>
No, haven't checked on the three machines at the office yet, nor even on
the laptop here. Will do so ASAP. Thanks for the explanation of your MO,
though I had sort of guessed that was what you were doing.

By the bye, after I opined that certain letters didn't represent
functions, I remembered that Tyson had compiled a whole list of
"functions," some of which didn't seem to do anything, so I just looked
there now, but didn't find RQ or UV.

Thanks for enabling us to track this down.


>I have no idea what practical use this routine is.>
Well, I think it could be very useful. Especially if one is working away
from one's usual desk and so doesn't have the Customization Guide to
hand. (Not to hassle Bry, but if we had that as a PDF on every machine
we worked on, or on a CD or a thumb drive...) In fact, the reason I
discovered the problem was that I was looking for a tool that might help
me find out why, on random occasions, when cutting and pasting between
XyW and Thunderbird, something would change my XyW CommandLine to the
blasted Action Bar. And when I looked in the docs, I didn't find the Alt
key listed, by itself, as invoking the Action Bar. I was pretty sure I
had not created that assignment, and thought Keystrokes would track it
down. And then we got off on this.

Patricia M. Godfrey