Sat 16-Mar-91: Having had the opportunity to use PCs extensively both at work and at home for several years I decided to take a very subjective look at what have been the most useful MsDos shareware and PD utilities for me. Here are my choices in an alphabetical order. Note that this list is subjective reflecting my own usages. Hence one cannot "submit" to this list, as some users and authors have done after this list has become fairly widespread. Comments and views are naturally welcome, nevertheless. There is also another list that might interest you. It is useful32.zip "The Most Useful PC Programs at SimTel and Garbo" by Samuel Ko. Fri 11-Oct-91: Updated the text and added some new items on my list. Sat 2-Nov-91: Added one further item (shrom) on the list, and rewrote some others a bit. For the record. I have registered all the shareware programs on this list. Fri 17-Apr-92: Updated the version numbers and added one new item. Tue 19-May-92: Updated the version numbers and added two new items. Sat 20-Feb-93: Updated the version numbers and added one new item. Fri 2-Jul-93: Made no additions but changed one choice and rewrote most of the items. Sat 3-Jul-93: Corrected the out-of-date information about target15.zip. Fri 24-Dec-93: Merry Christmas. Added information to same of the entries and updated the version numbers. Added three new items. The addresses of some of the authors can be found in 27493 Dec 4 17:57 garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/pd2/author23.zip author23.zip Email addresses of 160 MsDos shareware and PD authors All these programs can be found on the Garbo MsDos archives. ask.exe The most important command originally missing from MsDos batch programming. Ask comes under many names and has been rewritten by countless programmers. Also I have written my own in garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/ts/ tsbat43.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 MsDos 6.0 calling it CHOICE. You can find a choice clone choose.exe in tsutlf13.zip. scrlit18.zip A resident screen scrollback utility by Charles Aitkens. This handy TSR utility allows one to see back what has been written on the screen. Because the scroll-back buffer reserves a lot of memory even if it sensibly utilizes compression, srollit is best used with an upper memory manager like loadhigh introduced in MsDos 5.0's or lastbyte (see a later item). I have this tsr routinely loaded in my autoexec.bat. This is one case where I have changed my mind when a better utility came around. Originally I had buffit30.zip as my choice, but scrollit can capture colors and some output that buffit can't. So, after the srollit author made some crucial improvements based on my feedback suggestions in releasing version 1.7, I had a change of heart. 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 MsDos 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. dc106f.zip Directory control from the PC-Magazine by Michael Mefford. A simple, but a very useful point and shoot facility to copy, move, rename, or delete files. DC is an excellent example of the fact that a good program doesn't need to be over-packed with features nor need it be flashy. There is also an advanced rendition df460.zip by Gordon Haff called Directory Freedom. The interface is the same but there are much more options, and the program is very configurable. Also highly recommended. dcf40d.zip A fast 1-pass copying facility for floppies. One of the most irksome MsDos task is copying a floppy in a single drive. I have been looking for a suitable 1-pass program for quite awhile, and found quite a few, and this one is it for the time being. It has a nice interface and is fast since it can skip the empty sections. Yet, I included this utility with considerable doubts, because there still is ample room for improvement starting from the missing possibility of storing the option settings, removing the nag screen, etc. A simple but useful alternative to look at is xdcpy200.zip. Another option worth looking at is the more professional copyq312.zip. dirmat20.zip Dirmatch for comparing & manipulating two dirs side by side. Another really great utility from Michael Mefford. Originally appeared in the PC-Magazine. dirw.exe From my own garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/ts/tsutil39.zip utility collection. It is like MsDos 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 MsDos dir curiously lacks (at least in MsDos5.0). My dirw.exe displays the size of a disk also if it has no files. dirx110.zip A shell for listing and handling lzexe and pklite etc. compressed executables. A very useful companion to lzexe and pklite. Nothing is perfect, though. The documentation leaves much to be desired in a top utility. But the basic idea is very sound. Most importantly to my knowledge there are no alternatives (which is rather odd) so dirx is left to hold the field at the moment despite its faults and the non-support. Strangely, the author has shown no interest whatsoever in the feedback I have tried to give on the configuration problems with the program. Fortunately such a supercilious attitude is not common among the authors. dosclip.com "A TSR utility that provides Windows-like cut-and-paste facilities to applications running under DOS". A PC-Magazine utility by Douglas Boling in vol11n07.zip. I use it for example for cutting and pasting commands and data when being connected, using MsKemit or Telnet, to your Unix hosts Garbo and Chyde. The only problem is that the hot keys are too common and may thus interfere with other applications. For a patch see garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/pd2 /tspost09.txt. fed153.zip FileEDit binary editor for MsDos by Phillip Nickel. Binary (or rather hexadecimal) editors are specialized utilities needed only occasionally for advanced usage. As with ascii editors the choice of one's binary editor is a matter of taste and there are other goods ones like the MicroEMACS-like beav140.zip. gsz1129.zip Full-screen version of Zmodem file transfer protocol. Chuck Forsberg's Zmodem has become the veritable standard of file transfers from BBSes and between PCs and hosts. GSZ brings the visual interface to DSZ that has been formerly lacking while it has been offered by some telecommunication programs such as Telix. In the long run Forsberg's programs must have been one of the the most frequently updated programs on the scene, which is not always an unqualified boon. inter38*.zip Ralf Brown's MsDos Interrupt List. A staggering amount of internal lore absolutely essential for each and every serious PC programmer. Another definitive reference is helppc21.zip, which has some even more advanced material. keyrate.exe From my own garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/ts/tsutld20.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". MsDos 5.0 finally introduced this feature into the mode command, which goes to show that the idea was a good one. - On MsDos 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" list90e.zip Vernon Buerg's list program, a definite must for file browsing. It is so good that many other programs rely on list instead of having browsing routines of their own. Currently contains three versions of list of varying program sizes. Very handy also as a "grep" finder using the /F option. Like with so many programs I have retained also an older because of the gone features reported by the users. In the case of list the older version retained is /pc/goldies/list77a.zip. moder33.zip A list of MsDos FTP sites and moderators by Timo Salmi and Rhys Weatherley. Frequently updated. Yes I know that it is dubious to list so many of my own works, but this choice is unequivocally supported by the download statistics. With the natural exception of the file indexes this is by far the most heavily downloaded information file. There is also a more general FTP site list /pc/doc-net/ftp-list.zip newly inherited by Perry Rovers. pcopy787.zip Norm Patriquin's really fabulous copy program with a huge selection of useful optional switches. The current version is pcopy93.zip, but the program and its installation have become so bloated that I have personally preferred to stay with an older version. In fact I still use version pcopy 5.0 from /pc/miscutil/patriqui.zip on my old Zenith XT portable. The phenomenon is what the columnist John Dvorak calls excessive featurism. It is not just a question of disk space, and more features than one can usefully master, but also a serious question of increasing loading times despite faster and faster PCs. pklte115.exe PKWare's compress and uncompress executables. One of the great ideas of 1990 came from France from Fabrice Bellard. He wrote lzexe91.zip (currently) to decompress executable at call time by putting the decompression code into the executable. PKWare took the idea (an echo of the ancient .arc debacle?), and developed with their background a more professional product. I must say, however, that I don't like pklite's (commercial version's) ability to make irreversible compressed executables, because this increases the danger of virii going undetected. Of course, there are cracking programs in circulation to expand even the "irreversible" executables, but this situation is not stylish. pkz204g.exe The most useful all-round archiver. From PKWare. (Surrounded by some totally stone-age hassle around the encryption issue when exported outside North America). Pkzip was born out of the controversy and litigation on .arc archiving. There is also a Unix (actually multi-platform) version of zip by Mark Adler, Rich Wales, Jean-loup Gailly, and others of the InfoZIP programming group. Zip is our now compulsory choice in garbo.uwasa.fi archive maintenance with for example ZOO outdone with its date stamp problems and ARJ with its lack of a proper Unix version. Despite its dominance, pkzip is not without its downsides. Beside the encryption issue, the 2.0 release was advertized in PC magazines almost a year prematurely. It became known as a classic case of vaporware, and at first release pkz204c.zip was outrageously buggy and sloppily documented (the latter aspect still leaves a bit to be desired). But 2.04G is the dominating archiver with perhaps ARJ having the second most following with its excellent multi-disk capabilities. No wonder that the debates about "the best archiver" have been very common for example on the UseNet news. qedit215.zip QEdit, SemWare's text editor. More than perhaps any other category of programs, the choice of a text editor is a matter of taste. I have opted for QEdit because it has the same basic WordStar-like commands than Borland's Turbo Pascal interface, is nicely configurable, and has a fair macro language for advanced users. The only major thing I personally miss very much is a right-side justification. That is a problem I know will be corrected in the SemWare Editor (TSE), that will an upgrade of QEdit. At the time of writing this I have the prerelease version. I don't know, however, whether it will be shareware or fully commercial. TSE has a very much improved macro language. If I had to choose one single program to be the number one on my list, this would be it. scanv109.zip VIRUSCAN scans for a great number of major virus strains. McAfee's virus scanner has drawn true world-wide acclaim. I've needed it just once in earnest, but that's enough to get it on this list. One of the utilities that has been very frequently updated to keep up with the developments. By the time you read this, it is likely that the version number has grown again. I have been personally very pleased with the exemplary support from McAfee. Naturally, there are also other fine virus utilities like Skulason's F-PROT with its excellent interface and virus detection record, Greenberg's VIRX, and the very fast TBAV from the Netherlands. All available from Garbo's /pc/virus directory. shez95.zip A shell ("Compress Companion") to drive the many archivers for MsDos (that is for the programs un/compressing and clustering files). By Jim Derr, who has constantly been keeping Shez up to date with archiver developments. Makes life easy with so many alternative archiver methods in use. The number of the menu driven / hotkey options in this program is something to behold. Like most of the other programs on this list, I need it every day. Among its many advanced usages is the possibility of using it to convert archives from one format to another. shroom2d.zip ShellRoom. Swap to disk when shelling from an application. One of the big problems with many programs that allow the user to shell to Dos, is that the user is left with little memory. This very useful utility remedies that by swapping the application to dos when the application shells. Borland's Turbo Pascal 5.0 is the only important application I have found so far that is not amenable to SHell ROOM. (TP 7.0 no more causes this problem.) snippr26.zip Snip the screen into a file originally by Tom Kihlken in the PC-Magazine. The later versions are tweaks, that is the original source has been developed by several different savants. This TSR utility can capture text from the screen, and send it to the printer, a file, or the keyboard buffer as if typed. See garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/pd2/tspost09.txt for a patch to customize the Snipper hotkey. Personally I have stayed with /pc/goldies/ snippr24.zip since I do not need the new features. target15.zip Formerly sst_53b.zip "Seek and thou shalt find Supersonic Search Tool" originally called Whereis. An excellent filename finder by Keith Ledbetter now distributed by McAfee Associates. Fast, with a plethora of useful options including browsing inside archives, executing commands on found files, or even going to the directory of the found file. (Echoes Unix find in many respects). Can also find and list the duplicate files on a hard disk even if there are better, specialized programs in that particular respect. tcpy202.zip TurboCopy, Speedy multi-volume file transfer program. It is particularly useful if you often need to copy material from hardisk to floppy or vice versa. But is it a strange program in a way. It triggers the heuristic virus alert of the f-prot virus checking scanner. The f-prot author Frisk Skulason kindly told me that tcopy does not actually have a virus, but some strange superfluous code at the tail of the executable. Unfortunately the TurboCopy author is unreachble. In general I wonder why fast copying has not drawn more attention of the programmers. tlb-v220.zip The Last Byte MsDos 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 happens on my MsDos 3.30 office 386 where I have, 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 writing this 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 MsDos versions. The upper memory management was finally introduced in MsDos 5.0 with the all important power user's loadhigh command. tlx320-?.zip Telix 3.20 telecommunications package. There are many excellent telecommunication packages on the scene, and the choice is somewhat arbitrary between them. Telix was one of the first with inbuilt Zmodem, and its user interface is the most convenient I know. Telix has a new owner deltaComm Development which released one update right away, but nothing has been heard since. None of the telecom progs is completely without problems, and this goes for Telix, too. Another of the fine telecommunication packages is TeleMate. The most prevalent MsDos telecommunication program would, however, seem to be the fully commercial Procomm+. There is also a shareware Procomm version prcm243.zip. But when it comes to terminal emulation rather than full telecommunication none of them can touch the flexibility and power of MsKermit. tsrcom35.zip TSR utilities from TurboPower Software, also a must. Most importantly includes mark, release, and mapmem for unloading terminate and stay resident programs. The veritable standard of TSR maintenance. I have often advised the users of TSRs to apply mark / release from tsrcom rather than using the TSRs' own methods for removing them from the memory because of the danger of leaving holes and finally crashing the machine. .................................................................. Prof. Timo Salmi Co-moderator of comp.archives.msdos.announce Moderating at garbo.uwasa.fi anonymous FTP archives 128.214.87.1 Faculty of Accounting & Industrial Management; University of Vaasa Internet: ts@uwasa.fi BBS +(358)-61-3170972; FIN-65101, Finland