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the consequently outdated selections in here.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