Simon Stock's |
Information Page |
The Last One: from Menus to Word Processors |
I joined the Company in the early days of D J Systems as a Customer something or other. We never liked using titles. I wrote the Tandy version of The Last One. The earliest commercial version of TLO was menu driven. Scotty and I redesigned the DOS version of the software in its present Word Processor form. The problem at the time was how to get TLO to understand written instructions. The answer came from Dr. Jonathan Miller in a TV program about the brain. Guess! If you look for certain key words in a sentence you can nearly always guess what is wanted. |
String Files |
String files came about from some work Scotty wanted to do for Spec-Savers. We had to store large amounts of information in a database. Any piece of this information needed to be found very quickly without the problems involved in indexing everything. The solution was exceedingly simple. Forget records etc and just pour the information into as big a block on the disk as you could create. We virtual put a text file inside a binary file but cut out all the spaces. In this way we could put about 100 entries into a single block. A large Database would only consist of 100 records so searching was pretty fast. |
Delphi |
We were looking round for a language to write a Windows version of TLO and discovered Delphi. It had an easy to use Windows environment and a Basic like language, Pascal. We have added extra intelligence using components like TLOEdit which formats any input into its correct form. |
The Future |
David James designed the first versions of TLO. He was trying to make some software that was really intelligent by getting it to 'understand' what was being written. I believe the key to intelligent software lies in combining neural networks, the sort of software you use when talking to your computer, and object orientated programming. I have recently demonstrated a program at our local philosophical society that sort of thinks. It is really spooky! If you remember, the full name of the company is D J (AI) Systems, where AI stands for artificial intelligence! |
Contact |
E-mail SimStock@aol.com I have a Delphi TLO library if anyone is interested |