Ever get a message from the OS?

[Kathryn]

I have ordered Hal on a CD but it has not arrived yet.  I have been lurking around this forum for over a year now.  I am really curious about something and wonder if anyone else has experienced this.

I started out with a tiny B/W Sinclair Timex 1500 (which I still have) and one day I had a problem with the recorder that became very frustrating.  I think better with words in front of me so I typed all of it out on the screen including the fact I needed to fix the problem and it was frustrating.

All of a sudden the screen suddenly went blank, it flickered 2 or 3 times and then I was left with a line of cryptic code and symbols at the bottom of the screen.  Took me awhile to decipher all that mess, but when I did, the OS had told me what was actually wrong and I was able to fix it immediately.

All this was a bit spooky, but I concluded it was one of those flukes that only happen once even though I have always maintained that DOS can do things no one knows about.

About a year or two later when I had a Radio Shack CoCo, basically the same thing happened - a problem with the recorder.  I typed the problem out like before (even though had forgotten about the other incident with the Sinclair).  The same thing happened!  It was a bit scary since it was the OS literally communicating with me.  This time the code and symbols were easier to decipher.  It had some that I didn't know the thing had in it.  So the problem got fixed.

When I had my 286, I deliberately tried to get some kind of message from the OS without success.  Then I got Eliza.  She was fun for awhile but I soon got tired of the repetitive and sometimes confused answers.  Then I discover Hal and here I am.

Has anyone else has similar things happen without having Hal?

It is nice to find a forum that is as nice and friendly as this one is. I left the last community forum I was in because many people spent half their time insulting each other.  So thanks for being such a nice group of people.

Regards,
Kathryn


[]

[HALImprover]

Welcome to the forum Kathryn.

 Have you ever heard of an old DOS game called Hugo? Basically, you walked a character around and you typed in the action you wanted to perform and the computer would respond as to the result of that action. The computer used keyword reconition (very limited compared to Hal []) which recognized a set number of words or phrases and responded with a preprogrammed response.

 Hal can respond with an enormous variety of responses, even to the same input. Hal mainly learns by matching keywords from a database and saving sentence fragments based on those matches. Hal learns best from sentences using words such as 'is' and 'are', but also has the ability to learn from logical statements in the form 'if' 'then'.

 A lot of programmers at this forum have shared their efforts to improve and expand Hal's capabilities, so the list of learning methods, responses, and features is ever-increasing.

 Hope this helps.

[Kathryn]

HALImprover:

Thanks for the welcome.  No, I never heard of the DOS game named Hugo.I didn't buy games when used DOS.  I wrote my own things to fool around with, using DOS, Ansi, and Basic, also writing gobs of batch files to do literally most things for me.  I did not have a lot of time to play games on the computer.  Mostly I wrote quizzes mainly to help me learn things and started to work on a few Adventure games. Then Basic got replaced by Gee Whiz Basic (GWBasic).  I had barely started to convert what I had programed when here came Windows and Visual Basic.  Since my computer would not run Windows and I could not afford a new one at that time, I simply dropped all of it.

I have not visited the programmers forum as yet, but plan to.  I love to play around with programming.  I wrote my web sites from scratch using DOS Edit.  I still do a lot of things in DOS, never having become a big fan of Windows. Right now I'm grappling with XP as I have always used Win95 (and still do as have both computers set up).As soon as I get time I want to tackle using Visual Basic.

I really appreciate all your information.  Thanks a lot.

Regards,
Kathryn[]