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Timo's subjective choice of best PD & SW MS-DOS early material

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 I have moved the consequently outdated selections in here.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