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the consequently outdated selections in here.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
