More History

I wrote this program to Simulate My Own Teacher. I wrote it in 1976 in 360 bytes of assembly language for the Wince Control Module and translated it to the microprocessors used in the first Personal Computers. All of these machines had very simple character oriented displays or they talked over a serial line to a character oriented terminal. This is what the first version looked like.

I was very interested in what the graph looked like for early students because I had modeled the training algorithm on the Control Data computer and wanted to compare the predicted learning rates to actuals.

A few years later I got a call from Jim Wilson. He had been looking at all the products now available for learning code. But he couldn't find one that worked as well as what I put up on his Wintek control module. Did I have anything that would run on a PC? No, but, I had written a Pascal Version. Jim agreed to put that up on the PC and send me the result. Here it is for PCs running DOS emulation:

http://c2.com/~ward/morse/teach/morse.exe -- DOS Version, 7k, now of historical interest only

I tried this under Windows 3.1. It still worked but sounded a little uneven in its sending. Try dropping all the way back to DOS or shut down WinSock or whatever you have to do to make the PC think it is again a small machine. I've also tried it under Win95 where it works just fine even with the tcp/ip network running, and on Windows XP where the sound even comes out the multi-media speakers but the speed seems off.

Every few years I ask Jim to make a modification or two to the program, usually in response to thoughtful requests from users. He had finally lost track of the environment to make a 7k byte pc program compile. It was time to stop doing i/o directly to the speaker hardware and the timer-counter chip. The multimedia version is the result. Jim searched high and low for Portable Libraries that wouldn't bloat the program past the attention span of a dial-up user. The result is simple, clean and efficient. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Continue to the Welcome Visitors page to download this Macintosh version or versions for Linux, Windows or DOS .

As recently as 2015 I've recoded the basic teaching algorithm as a Web Based Morse Teacher plugin to the federated wiki.

See also Historic Source Code, History Of Morse Code, Qst Article

Much of the text for this site has been addapted from my original morse teacher distribution site:

This original site has been translated into the Belorussian language by Bohdan Zograf of the Belarusian State University, Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science:

 
Last edited January 2, 2016
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