[time-nuts] Lady Heather on low power CPU/Linux?

[Mark Sims]

The roots of Lady Heather lie in a program written in the mid 1980's for controlling a Magellan GPS board (a multiplexed single channel receiver - Bruce has it now).  That program ran under DOS.   The code is pretty much straight ANSI C.   I modified it to work with the Tbolt and added the graphing code (1024x768 screens only).  It still was basically a DOS program,  but could limp under Windows.  The intent was (and pretty much still is) to dedicate a cheap laptop to running it (in fact there are some laptops out there with tbolts mounted internally, powered off the CD rom interface).    I've run it on laptops that could not even be given away (and 2.4 GHz machines can be had for under $40, including OS)

John Miles ported over the code to use his graphics and serial I/O library which made it work better under Windows.  The serial code had problems so I rewrote that.   Also the graphics library used a proportional font that made displaying tables rather ugly.   That was modified to use fixed width fonts and just about any screen size.  Also the adev code was modified to use John's incremental adev code.  This allowed much better real-time adev calculations with pretty much unlimited depth even on VERY slow processors.

The code was still kept up so that it could  run on the cheapest, most minimal laptops around running DOS (EMS memory anyone).  Then the evil Lady Heather got uppity and started adding all sorts of stuff,  memory usage be damned.   The DOS code  is still there,  but enabling it kills a whole bunch of stuff.   It is pretty much requires a Windows level operating system now.  The user and operating system interface is intentionally kept as primitive and basic as possible to make porting it easy.   

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I really don't like having to run Windows just for this lone program
and even then the screen design and over all user interface is
primitive, even by Windows standards