The Competition Computers

Introduction
Running Programs
Documentation

Introduction

The PCs are on the first and second floor of the computer applications building (L1.01 and L2.01). There are forty seven in each floor (ninety four in all, numbered CA 01 - CA 94). The number of each computer is marked onto the top right hand side of the computer. The computers are connected together in a Novel network.

Each computer has a 120 Megabyte hard disk that is split into two 60M partitions, ‘C:’ and ‘D:’. DOS and Windows are on the ‘C:’ drive, the ‘D:’ drive is used to store programs etc.

All these computers run MS DOS. If you are unfamiliar with MSDOS, there is a help program. Type ‘help’, and it gives a list of MSDOS commands. If you want details on any particular command, type ‘help command’. The most useful commands are:

dir : gives a directory listing
cd : Allows you to change directory
type : types a file
copy : Copies one file to another location
del : deletes a file
set : sets environment variables. In particular set path allows you to specify where executable files are to be searched.

Running Programs

BASIC

You can create and run BASIC programs with the command, qbasic. There are four example programs in the C:\dos directory.

Pascal

The following sequence of commands will allow you to run Turbo Pascal 6.0 from the network.

	set path=C:\dos;G:\pascal\tp6.0
	D:
	turbo

Note that you can’t run turbo from the G:drive. There are other versions of Pascal in the G:\pascal directory that you may wish to examine.

There are some example programs in the G:\pascal\tp6.0\demos directory.

C and C++

There are also a number of C compilers including recent versions of Borland and Microsoft compilers. The following sequence of commands will allow you to start using Borland C 3.1:

	set path=C:\dos;G:\c\bc3.1\bin
	D:
	bc

There are some example programs in the G:\c\bc3.1\examples directory.

Documentation

We don’t have any manuals that we can give out but there is extensive on-line documentation with all the programs listed above. Start the program and select help, and explore. Note that if you are unsure about a function, the help often gives example code explaining how to use the function. It is normally possible to copy this example code straight into your program. So it pays to be familiar with the help system.