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EARLYBST.TXT (All rights reserved) Wed 13-September-1995
Timo's subjective choice of best PD & SW MS-DOS early material
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Not surprisingly many of the selections that were on my earlier
versions of the best programs list BESTPROG.TXT were utilities that
complemented what the earlier MS-DOS versions lacked. I have moved
the consequently outdated selections in here.
ask.exe The most important command originally missing from
MS-DOS batch programming. Ask comes under many names
and has been rewritten by countless programmers.
Also I have written my own in ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi
/pc/ts/tsbat47.zip. The basic idea of asks is to
prompt the user for a choice, and return an
errorlevel (or sometimes put a value to an
environment variable), which then can be used for a
conditional jump in the batch in accordance with the
user's choice. My own ask uses the most common ask
standard of returning as the errorlevel the ASCII
number of the first letter of the user's response,
but I also have written an errorlevel version. It is
interesting that MicroSoft finally succumbed and
introduced a similar command in MS-DOS 6.0 calling
it CHOICE. You can find a choice clone choose.exe in
tsutlf15.zip if you don't have MS-DOS version 6+.
Furthermore, although little known, ordinary batch
programming can be used to input the user's response
to an environment variable, as explained in
tsbat47.zip.
ced10da.zip Command line editor. This facility lets the user to
recall earlier commands, edit the commands, make
aliases (synonyms) for the commands, and optionally
ignore commands. CED is old, but still extremely
useful as such even compared DOSKEY which was
introduced with MS-DOS 5.0. Don't go without it, or
some other good, alternative command line editor.
Despite being old, CED still often features on the
best program lists of many computer magazines. The
one feature CED unfortunately lacks is file name
completion present in some other command line
editors. The later versions of CED have gone
commercial, as far as I know. For other
alternatives, like command line editors with file
name completion, see Garbo's /pc/cmdutil directory.
dirw.exe From my own ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/ts/tsutil41.zip
utility collection. It is like MS-DOS dir /w, but it
also shows the file attributes, and it can be made
to recurse all the directories. I use it on a daily
basis to have a backup list of what my hard disks
contain. It is vindicative to note that in DOS 5.0
the new DIR command was endowed among other things
with abilities what my dirw already had. Yet
dirw.exe still has a feature which the MS-DOS dir
curiously lacks (at least in MS-DOS 5.0). My
dirw.exe displays the size of a disk also if it has
no files.
keyrate.exe From my own ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/ts/tsutld22.zip
utility collection. What it effectively does is that
it speeds up the cursor movement. An absolute
necessity because the slow default keyrepeat rate
makes moving the cursor a real pain in the neck.
Mostly found only in commercial packages. Haven't
seen many shareware or PD "competitors", but I may
be too "optimistic". MS-DOS 5.0 finally introduced
this feature into the MODE command, which goes to
show that the idea was a good one. - On MS-DOS 3.3 I
have in my autoexec.bat "keyrate 0 0". In 5.0 (and
6.0) I use "mode con: rate=30 delay=1". Since some
programs (e.g. Windows) alter the typemaatic rate, I
also have "doskey fast=mode con: rate=32 delay=1" in
my AUTOEXEC.BAT.
tlb-v252.zip The Last Byte MS-DOS Upper Memory Manager by Dan
Lewis. It enables loading device drivers and TSRs to
high memory. Such a utility becomes a practical
necessity when the number of memory-hungry TSRs
grows, as happened on my late MS-DOS 3.30 office 386
where I had, for example, a network driver to
connect to our department's laser printer. None of
the upper memory managers are simple to use, but
Dan's is not prohibitively difficult as some others.
At the time of first introducing this list Dan was
upgrading to 2.00 with a new user interface. (I was
of the beta testers, and I don't accept such a task
easily because of my own time limitations). Last
Byte is a typical example of a utility grown out of
deficiencies of the earlier MS-DOS versions. The
upper memory management was finally introduced in
MS-DOS 5.0 with the all important power user's
LOADHIGH command. Dan has a mailing list on Internet
for TLB users. Last Byte still is a fine program,
but has naturally lost practially all its edge with
the introduction of MS-DOS' own memory management in
version 5.0. But it qualifies on the list "for fine
services rendered". As far as I understand, Dan has
decided to give up maintaing the progra,
....................................................................
Prof. Timo Salmi Co-moderator of news:comp.archives.msdos.announce
Moderating at ftp:// & http://garbo.uwasa.fi archives 193.166.120.5
Department of Accounting and Business Finance ; University of Vaasa
ts@uwasa.fi http://uwasa.fi/~ts BBS 961-3170972; FIN-65101, Finland