BESTPROG.TXT   (All rights reserved)   Wed 15-March-1995

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

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. You are free to quote
brief passages from my text provided you clearly indicate the source
with an acknowledgment. Please do not distribute any part of this
package separately.

The addresses of some of the authors can be found in
 38653 Feb 26 18:55 garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/pd2/author33.zip
 author33.zip Email addresses of 243 MS-DOS shareware and PD authors

asa55c-?.zip    The As-Easy-As spreadsheet. At time of writing of
                this item we only have one shareware spreadsheet to
                offer from Garbo, but it is all that is needed. This
                123 and VP planner compatible spreadsheet gives all
                the basic functions needed in a good spreadsheet
                including useful graphics plotting. Highly
                recommended.

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 garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/ts/
                tsbat46a.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 tsutlf14.zip
                if you don't have MS-DOS version 6+.

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.

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. But I have a
                nagging suspicion, with no hard evidence whatsoever,
                that DF sometimes causes confusion on the disk.

dcf49.zip       A fast 1-pass copying facility for floppies. One of
                the most irksome MS-DOS task is copying a floppy in
                a single drive. (Also finally seen to in the latest
                MS-DOS versions, I hear.) I have been looking for a
                suitable 1-pass program to recommend for quite
                awhile, and found quite a few, and this one is it.
                It has a nice interface and is fast since it can
                skip the empty sections. Yet, I originally included
                this utility with considerable doubts, because there
                still was 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 copyq318.zip.

cshow877.zip    Much of the information and even recreation comes in
                the form of GIF pictures. For example, Gargo
                archives now have an extensive collection of select
                astronomy images. These required a good viewer, like
                Bob Berry's the CompuShow GIF viewer both with with
                a traditional and dialog interface. I prefer the
                former and have listed that version. Bob has been
                imporving his program constantly. The 8.77 version
                can utilize the full properties of the video card,
                thus giving very sharp images when the video adapter
                is capable of it.

dirmat31.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/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.

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 MsKermit 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.zip.

fed153.zip      FileEDit binary editor for MS-DOS 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. See Garbo's /pc/binedit/ directory for
                the the other, more often updated alternatives like
                hex41a.zip.

fp-216.zip      The honors of virus scanning will now have go to
                Virus Protection system by Fridrik Skulason. It is
                free for private users while it is fully commercial
                to institutional usage. All the tests I have seen
                have ranked it very highly both for its user
                interface and its virus detecting and protection
                capacity. Here I want to mention also another very
                good virus scanning program. McAfee's scn-214e.zip.
                Both these excellent programs have been kept up to
                date at a good rate. Both have given exemplary
                support and both have drawn true world-wide acclaim.
                Naturally there are other scanners, too, like the
                very fast TBAV from the Netherlands. All available
                from Garbo's /pc/virus directory.

ftp-list.zip    Anonymous FTP FAQ and Site Listing by Perry Rovers.
                Frequently updated. This list has changed maintainer
                several times during the last few years, and they
                all have done a good job. But Perry has taken this
                lists to new hights. Quite an impressive feat of
                record keeping. There is also a specialized list for
                MS-DOS FTP sites which I maintain. It is /pc/pd2/
                moder47.zip. Both lists are heavily downloaded from
                Garbo.

gifcm133.zip    GIF Commentor to embed/remove text comments by J.
                Lee. This is practically a maintainer's utility. It
                allows deleting and inserting text comments into GIF
                image files. It has been of much use to me in
                preparing the astronomy and campus GIFs for Garbo.

geoclk60.zip    GeoClock by Joseph R Ahlgren is an interesting,
                specialized program. It is a world map with a moving
                day/night grayline. It can be used for displaying
                locations of, for example FTP sites, on the world
                map.

gsz0920.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. The pace of updates,
                has fortunately slacked in 1994-1995. Likewise, I
                would prefer growing version numbers. But the
                program is an establishment.

inter44*.zip    Ralf Brown's MS-DOS 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. Another information
                file of interest to programmers is dosref33.zip.

keyrate.exe     From my own 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"

keytap13.zip    A Non-TSR User Keystroke Simulator be Neil Faulks.
                This is what is called a "keyfake" utility. What it
                does is that it allows you to predefine in a batch
                what keys will be automatically pressed first when
                an application is called. Keyfake programs are very
                handy for customizing in which state you wish to
                enter some programs, or even skip the initial
                screens like I do for the VP+ spreadsheet program.
                The difference in keytap is that unlike other
                keyfake programs it is not a TSR, but works by like
                shell.

list91b.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.

mrcry209.zip    If you wish to see and excellent mathematics program
                take a look at Mercury "Equation solver based on
                Borland's Eureka". It you are familiar with
                Mathematica you'll see that it can perform many
                similar mathematical derivation tasks. Specialized,
                of course.

nbird26.zip     Not everything has to be totally serious. Relax for
                once and take a look at "3D animation of bird in
                flight by N. Centanni, if you have at least a 386
                with a VGA. This is strictly pastime, but it gives a
                very nice pretense of moving.

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.

pcps800.zip     In an office with laser postscript printers one need
                a good postscript program with the ability to handle
                even the upper ascii characters correctly. Such a
                utility is provided by Paul Carapetis is his "Print
                files on PostScript". Besides it has an impressive
                amount of options. Granted, using any utility like
                this always will be complicated and requires much
                experimenting first to get the kind of output one
                wishes.

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 viruses going undetected. Of
                course, there are reversal 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.
                (Earlier 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.

rmail41.zip     PC ReadMail news & email & messages & FAQs etc by
                Jeroen Schipper is an excellent, configurable
                facility to read news and other kind of digested
                material off line.

qedit3c.zip     QEdit Advanced, 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 was
                corrected in the fully commercial SemWare Editor
                (TSE). 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.

scram10.zip     Why not include also one excellent educational game
                on this list. My choice then is Scramble (Scrabble)
                crossword board game by Diana Gruber. This
                well-known word game is played even competitively.
                On a computer is it a very good practice of the
                English language for a non-english user. The game is
                a nicely programmed realization of the theme.

scrlit18.zip    A resident screen scrollback utility by Charles
                Aitkens. This handy TSR utility allows one to scroll
                back what has been written on the screen. Because
                the scroll-back buffer reserves a lot of memory even
                if it sensibly utilizes compression, scrollit is
                best used with an upper memory manager like loadhigh
                introduced in MS-DOS 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 scrollit author made
                some crucial improvements based on my feedback
                suggestions in releasing version 1.7, I had a change
                of heart.

shez106.zip     A shell ("Compress Companion") to drive the many
                archivers for MS-DOS (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, and
                much much more.

showf251.zip    A disk mapping utility by my net friend and Turbo
                Pascal guru Duncan Murdoch. It is without bells and
                whistles, but can under special circumstances be a
                real life-saver. It shows what you have written on
                your harddisk. Combined with any good screen capture
                program, you can retrieve at least parts of lost
                text with it. It once saved me a lot of grief after
                a program munched one of my text files. Show Fat
                helped me to retrieve from disk what was essential
                when the actual file could not be restored by any
                other correction or unerase program. Duncan's Show
                Fat is also instructive in showing how data is
                arranged on your harddisk.

shrom24b.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 disk 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 ("tweaked") 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.zip 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.

swag.zip        SWAG Reader + Information Files, SourceWare Archival
                Group. Tobether with its data files a hige amout of
                Turbo Pascal programming lore for the initiated.

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.

tcpy203.zip     TurboCopy, Speedy multi-volume file transfer
                program. It is particularly useful if you often need
                to copy material from harddisk to floppy or vice
                versa. But is it a strange program in a way. One of
                the files within the package triggered the heuristic
                virus alert of the f-prot virus checking scanner.
                The f-prot author Frisk Skulason kindly told me that
                it does not actually have a virus, but some strange
                superfluous code at the tail of the executable.
                Unfortunately the TurboCopy author is unreachable.
                Another small hitch is that the program muddles the
                blink attribute. I am a bit hesitant about this
                entry to my list. In general I wonder why fast
                copying has not drawn more attention of the
                programmers.

tel2308b.zip    Some programs, whether good or less so, are a
                practical necessity under certain conditions. NCSA
                Telnet v2.3.08 is such a program. It is used for
                ethernet connections at our university's PC machines
                for connecting to our Unix hosts. Recently the
                Finnish universities decided to adopt the 8-bit
                latin1 characters with Finnish a" a' o" twists which
                not even MsKermit cannot handle. One of our
                programmers, Tuomas Eerola, did a great work of
                adapting the translation tables and sources for
                Telnet.

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 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".

tlx322-?.zip    Telix 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.
                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 MS-DOS telecommunication program
                would, however, seem to be the fully commercial
                Procomm+. 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.

uuexe532.zip    One of the methods of posting programs on Usenet is
                to to uuencode the material so that it can be sent
                as 7-bit ordinary text over the connections. This
                format cam be used to deliver material by email and
                in the binary postings newsgroups. There are many
                programs which can convert such material back and
                forth. Richards Marks' UUde/encode + XXde/encode is
                the pick of the lot.

..................................................................
Prof. Timo Salmi      Co-moderator of comp.archives.msdos.announce
Moderating at garbo.uwasa.fi anonymous FTP archives  193.166.120.5
Department of Accounting and Business Finance; University of Vaasa
Internet: ts@uwasa.fi   BBS +(358)-61-3170972; FIN-65101,  Finland
