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Gold Medal Software - Volume 5 (Gold Medal) (1995).iso
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szv132.arj
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HISTORY.SZV
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1994-11-13
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Original History of SZV
For those of you interested, here is a complete history of
how SZV began. See WHATSNEW.SZV for all changes for each version
from 0.2 on.
Starting Out
Back in May 1994, I had a thought. This thought was that I
really liked the .ZIP file viewers on bulletin board systems
(such as DataView and Aviewcom). I decided then that I could
easily creat my own .ZIP viewer, they did it and why couldn't I?
So I did.
In the Beginning
In the very early stages of SZV's development, I had a total
of 3 beta versions before finally actually coming out with
version 1.00.
In the beginning, (5-28-94), in order to use SZV and to even
get it to run, you had to either do all of the following
manually, or else you had to use ZIPVIEW.BAT. This batch file
follows:
@ECHO OFF
COPY %1 SZVTEMP.ZIP
SZV
DEL SZVTEMP.*
As you can see, this was a rather difficult thing to do just
to view one file, so other versions came and eventually
ZIPVIEW.BAT was completely done away with.
When (or if) you actually got SZV to run successfully, you
didn't have very many features or options. It is important to
mention here that I borrowed my file reading routines from a
completely different program, I just added some very minor code.
It is also important to mention here that I wrote my end-of-file
detection routine, but this unfortunately doesn't seem to work
correctly at this time.
When you actually viewed the .ZIP file, about your only
choice was to continue reading or stop. When you stopped, it
simply exited and that was it.
0.2
By the time 0.2 was ready for release (beginning of June),
quite a lot had changed. You can find a list of the things that
changed in 0.2 at the beginning of WHATSNEW.SZV, but one thing
not listed there is that the function of ZIPVIEW.BAT had changed
quite a bit. Now it was possible to actually enter the name of
the .ZIP file you wanted to view from within the program, and in
fact that was the ONLY way to view .ZIP files now. Now, however,
the ZIPVIEW.BAT was still necessary because it was the bridge
between SZV and PKUNZIP.EXE instead of the launcher for SZV.
This then made it possible to, instead of viewing .ZIP files,
modify it to work with .ARJ or any archiver which had a view
function.
Also, by this time, SZV was a lot more stable. It didn't
crash the system (well it never did anyway) and was overall a
really good program.
1.00, The MAJOR Rewrite!!!
In 0.3, I did add a new feature which basically allowed one
to view several .ZIP files without ever leaving the program. 0.3
was the last beta before 1.00, so it shouldn't be surprising that
0.2 and up were all very different from 0.1, but 0.3 and 1.0 had
major differences, as you will see in a moment.
Version 1.00 was the first "real" and "official" release of
SZV, so it should not be surprising that 1.0 added over 10 (13 to
be exact) new features, changes, and over all code modifications.
Very little original code was left from 0.3 after 1.0 was
complete, but the menu which was added in 0.3 accidentally got
deleted. It was later added back in in 1.2. Everything from the
opening screen to the closing screen had been completely
rewritten, except for the EOF detection and the code to read the
temp file PKunzip made for SZV. Now code was added to delete the
temp file as SZV exited so there was no need at all to do it
manually. Now, also, the ZIPVIEW.BAT disappeared and was
replaced by ZIPVIEW.COM. Again, ZIPVIEW.COM would eventually be
removed.
1.2
The main feature of 1.1 was now a BANNER.TXT would be
displayed before the copyright message, and now there was a
feature for registered users only that didn't appear in the
shareware version.
By 1.2, another group of changes was taking place. Now an
INIT.BAT would be run right after BANNER.BAT, and SZV Lite was
removed from the SZV archive. ZIPVIEW.COM was also removed and
is now permanently built into the SZV code. I am debating on
modifying a few things in SZV and creating SAV (Simple ARJ
Viewer) but as of this time that isn't done yet.