ABC Installation Guide

The installation guides for the various systems are shown below. They are also included with the ABC system.

Unix (DEC, AXP, HP)

Assuming that you have stored the binary file as unix.tar.Z, issue the following commands:

% uncompress unix.tar.Z

% tar -xvf unix.tar

This will produce an ABC directory with a number of subdirectories. Edit the Makefile and make the following changes:

Modify ABCENV,ABCDEF,SRC and DEF to the appropriate directories
Uncomment the system of your choice and comment the others

Edit the file env/lesson.pub and change the directory paths to reflect your local situation. Note that the fields are tab separated.

Finally, issue the command

% make all

Running ABC

The X defaults for ABC are in the file abc_defaults. You may want to load them before you attempt to run ABC. The directory containing the executable for ABC needs to be in the PATH variable.

To run the lessons, assuming you are in the main abc directory:

Programmer mode: % abc/bin/abc

Learning to author: % abc/bin/abc -a author

Learning to golf: % abc/bin/abc -a golf

Macintosh

The basic ABC system requires about 2.1MB of disk storage.

Binhex the file.
Double-click on the resulting self-extracting archive (SEA). This will produce a folder with the installation instructions and another self-extracting archive.
Click on the file called abc.sea and it will ask you where you want to store the ABC files. You should specify your default HD folder. It will take about a minute to decompress and store the files.
If you don't have Teachtext on your system, you may copy it to your system folder. It is necessary to read this documentation as well as edit some other ABC files.
Go to the abc:env folder and double-click on the ABC document called program. A window entitled ABC should appear in a few moments. A large folder titled ABC should appear in the window. Select the Revert option under the File menu to exit. This process will create a file called lesson.pub which contains some lesson information for each lesson you publish and make available to students. If you should change the names of your disks, you will need to edit this file with a texteditor and change the names in this file.

Programming Instructions

Create a development folder and copy the ABC script ABC:env:program to your development folder. Double-click on this script and the ABC programmer window will be displayed. Note that you can create other scripts from within ABC by selecting the Options/Startup... menu item on the main ABC menu. See the programmer documentation for more details.

When you exit the program and choose to save your changes, these changes will be stored in the file abc.chk. Do not delete this file or you will lose your work.

You can also make an alias of the ABC script and put it in your Apple Menu Items folder in the system folder. You can then access ABC directly from the menu.

Authoring Instructions

Create a development folder and copy the ABC script ABC:env:author to your development folder. Double-click on this script and the ABC author window will appear.

When you exit the program and choose to save your changes, these changes will be stored in the file abc.chk and the previous abc.chk file (if any) will be copied to abc.oldchk. Do not delete these files unless you want to start over.

Quicktime

ABC supports Quicktime movies. The Quicktime extension is available on the network.

MSDOS

Minimum Requirements

Windows 3.1
4MB of main memory
2.1MB of disk space
256 Colors (preferable)

Installation Instructions

Copy your files to a temporary installation directory
Double-click on install.bat
This will create directory c:\abc\env and put 9 files in it:
- abc.env-the environment file containing all the original objects
- abc.exe-the executable runtime program
- program.abc-an ABC script to start ABC in programmer mode
- author.abc-an ABC script to start ABC in author mode
- lesson.pub-a text file defining all published lessons on your system. Be sure to keep in the same directory as abc.exe.
- acomp.exe-external ABC compiler
- janitor.exe-program to compress and build lesson files
- upgrade.exe-program to bring .chk files up-to-date
- wcomp.exe-external widget compiler
Double-click on c:\abc\env\abc.exe This will start ABC and associate the file type .abc (an ABC script) with abc.exe. Once the main window appears, you can exit ABC by typing CTRL/R (revert).

Starting a Session

Create a development directory such as c:\abc\test and copy either author.abc or program.abc into that directory. Double-click on the abc script to begin. In a few moments you should see the main window of ABC.

Questions?

Contact Pete Boysen