20-I-1990.
One of the attempts to make an invoice on the laser printer for city dairy. It was some crummy Ricoh printer, with capricious drivers, leaky toner drum and generally I regret the day we sold it to them (if indeed DBA was the vendor, equally likely they got it from someone who owed them, as a compensation*). There were no proper priter drivers for lasers under DOS, unless you wanted to print in just simple courier font, without diacriticals. Sooo... I had to code it very much by hand, using all the escape sequences I could muster. This is attempt 3.1.
At least I got the positioning for the header just about right, except the escape sequences should have some stop character. So whatever there came as one was taken as one - and that's the first character of every string, e.g. it's not "ačun" it should be "račun", but the r was eaten.
Of course, the Ricoh had its own escape sequences, so whatever I learned here was purely academic. I acquired experience, not code that I could use elsewhere. Few years later, when I tried to repeat this for a HP printer, this was useless. I had to do it from scratch.
Version 3.7, same day (!), was much better.
It already has the slovima routine, which worked just fine. The line part is still not complete - there's the quantity, price, amount, kalo (weight lost while sitting - evaporation etc, mostly for cheese), tax are all missing. Most of the line items are just jokes, or simply tests (as in item codes being 01, 02, 03 and 1234567 - to see how many digits would fit). The totals are not properly aligned, should use some font where a space is not wider than a digit.
All in all, not too bad for a DOS app, written in good old fox of the time (I think still mFoxplus 2.1, perhaps FP 1.02).
Some time this winter we had trouble with hi fi beans... the pressure cooker was on the small rešo (same one I used as a student) in the back of our little kitchen, next to mirko. The weight valve didn't sit right and got stuck, until the pressure lifted it. By that time the pressure was quite high, so the extra air went out with the liquid, in three jets through the three holes in the valve. The holes aren't horizontal, they point upwards, and one of the jets hit the left speaker, which was hanging on the wall above, a meter and a half away.
The bass on the left channel never worked properly after that.
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* "compensation" meant then "I can't pay you, but got some goods instead" "Okay, give what you have". So one guy from sezam got saddled with 200 toilet flushers which he then couldn't sell. The whole forum mocked him for weeks.
Mentions: DBA, fox, mirko, rešo, sezam, slovima, in serbian
28-II-2020 - 16-VIII-2025