Timing Freed from Processing Speed
A Limited Personal History of Visual Basic Timing in Simulations
A Whole New Toolbar Control
I remember my excited reaction when the Timer controls became available for developers using Visual Basic, with the release of Version 5. Then it was the year 1996, and for Visual Basic programmers the new controls, and especially the Timer, opened up new possibilities for coding up software than had ever before come to my mind.
Hindrances to Simulations
Before this period of time, developing software that could keep time in proper real-simulation was far beyond advanced and far more than prohibited by technologies in hardware, frameworks, and programming languages.
The crafty and handy Timer control triggered a huge spectrum of neat new capabilities that the event driven programmer could aim to develop, design, author, invent, and pioneer.
Enabling Unexplored Realms of Software
It’s all the same dedicated passion in the end, and that is to stay exposed to technology and readiness that present me with potential laid out in the months and years ahead, for suitably mysterious though predictably portentous projects awaiting me, in the ever quest to build worlds of software.
Before the Timer control came along to event-driven programming, my simulator programs I developed with Visual Basic 3 ran at a simulation speed solely dependent on computer clock speeds of the various hardware. A Drop-down Combo-box I had stuffed full of time increments of differing duration, so my simulation program could run at differing speeds. When I was programming my programs with the 80486 processor using Visual Basic version 3, I never had dreamed nor imagined that the Timer function would provide what it provided. I was totally ignorant of any other options beside slaving simulation speed to computer hardware speed.
Coding for Windows Desktop — Post Visual Basic 5
Such new features expanded my frontiers greatly and made hobby programming a renewed joy, full of sure tough yet fun challenges and hopefully doable dive-in days of work building the newer, better, faster, more stunning, and more deftly clever software creation.
Timing Freed from Processing Speed was originally published in Humen Facets Techniques (Mastery Meny Sciences) on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.