[Trlog] DOS forever!

[KL7RA]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bob Evans" <Bevans at hal-pc.org>
To: "'TRlog'" <TRlog at contesting.com>

Bob writes:


> I'm still amazed that TRlog runs on my main station's old 486/100 with
> 8M of RAM and a 160Mb hard drive, but it works great.  I have 3 parallel
> ports and 4 serial ports running with my SO2R setup (pair of IC-765s,
> each with their own outboard 9 port coax switches and ICE 6 band filters
> so either rig can be the "run" rig with any antenna).      
-snip-
> My long overdue point is, give TRlog a true DOS environment and it will
> work fine.
-snip-

I agree 100% and once a year I remind folks of this:

TRlog is written in DOS turbo Pascal that was designed to run on obsolete
garbage dump PC's found on E-bay. 486/100 works, p-90+ is better.
Serial boards, bubble wrap and power cords cost more then the PC.

The modern PC with Windows is running multi-tasking code that was 
designed for receiving worms, virus and 100 e-mail porn spams a day. As 
the radio is unique to our ham station for contesting then the ham station 
should have its own dedicated DOS computer if you chose to use TRLog. 
A windows machine is still useful in the ham shack as it can feed spots from
the internet to the DOS machine and run gray line maps, etc.

I know the work arounds are allowing many to use TR on a window's PC 
but this may get harder in the future. I also know many in my age group 
will be DOS/ TRLog forever so the program does have a future and reason
to be improved. At this time software written for windows can't improve 
my score but someday it will have CW decoding and other powerful tasks
beyond DOS. That will be a good time for me to quite the game.

73 Rich KL7RA