With the advent of Arduino and Raspberry devices, I've seen or sensed an even more steep decline in the availability and use of tools to allow one to use their own Windows based computer to interact with the world.
I used to program for a living, but most of those languages are now in museums and behind glass. Learning FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, Assembler, well those pretty much disappeared with the advent of the PC and then even more of a loss when Windows came along and prevented folks like me from getting to the hardware. The last serious programming I did on a PC was the use QBASIC to read, display and store data from my Heathkit ID-5001. Several attempts to use Visual Basic were not pleasant. I used FoxPro, which was a great data manipulation tool, but not to input anything except from the keyboard.
Enough lamenting. Despite all the announced efforts to get kids interested in programming, and I think the very inexpensive things like Arduino help a lot to teach the how and why, I'm interesting in using my Win 7 or eventually Win10 based machine to do what our software packages, like Weather Display and others, to actually read data from the USB to Com port adapter and then do a little manipulation, and then write the info to a file that Weather Display can read and use, just as if Brian had written a custom interface from my station to his software. He, in effect, has done that by allowing one to put a file filled with the data string onto the hard drive and his universal station interface basically reads and does his magic with it, rather than selecting something like a Davis, Vaisala, etc.
So now knowing what I wish to do, I'm hoping someone can advise me as to a programming language, sort of like old QBASIC or Visual, that is affordable, will produce an executable that will allow me to read the USB port (interface drivers in place to do the details of course) and write a text file as my home station provides the data for WD.
Thoughts? Suggestions? I know things like php scripts can do a lot (Saratoga anyone?) but that essentially is running a web page and is far from what I need to do.
Thnaks for any thoughts or leads. Dale