NWA-PCUG 2/99 NewsLetter Article 18861 N. Hwy 112, Springdale, AR 72762-9303 Down Memory Lane by Don Two, NWA-PCUG I have mentioned that I have found a lot of romance, mystery and intrigue associated with the development of personal computing. There is also a lot of nostalgia for me, at least. Take last week, for instance. When he learned that we were starting this Computer Museum, Dr. Kermit Baker called and asked whether we'd be interested in a computer that he had owned for many years. Based upon his description, I answered that we would. He brought it to the January PCUG meeting, and loaded it into my car. It was an early DTK XT clone, with one FD, and a 30 Mb HD. It was initially powered by an 8088 chip running at 4.77 MHz. He had later upgraded to a V20 chip, which gave it a Turbo speed of 10.00 MHz, and added another FD, and another 30 Mb HD. The 5 1/4" floppy drive is one such as I have never seen. The flat front panel of the drive snaps up to allow insertion of the disk, and then snaps back down into place, completely covering the disk slot. Push on it, and it flies up again and ejects the disk. He said that he had removed all personal files from the compressed 30-Mb hard drive, but had left the software in the event that it was useful. Was I ever glad that he did! There are early versions of Word Perfect, dBase, and two successive versions of WordStar. But what caught my attention was his 'Util' directory! In those days when we all had to use MS DOS at the command line level, we were acutely aware of its shortcomings. So, also, were a bunch of guys sitting around their kitchen tables writing short programs to fill in the gaps in what DOS provided. These were distributed as shareware on approval, at very low costs. You did not have to pay for them if you did not continue to use them. Dr. Baker had 359 such utility files in his directory! What a treasure trove! As I scrolled through the directory, I found many filenames that evoked fond memories. And, it is easy to scroll through a file in DOS - that is, if you use one of his utilities named 'scroll.exe.' I, too, over time, have collected a significant number of these wonderful little programs. With file extensions of .bat, .com, and .exe, they helped us with file and disk management, navigation, environment control, expanded printer capabilities, and many other tasks that made it easier to live with DOS. Or, more accurately, to live without DOS. But, Microsoft was more of an adopter or assimilator than an innovator, and they bought, back engineered, some, and just plain copied many of the better utilities. As they were incorporated, DOS gradually grew version by version, from one disk to two to three to ever-larger packages. And DOS got better with every addition. But it was still DOS. It was still command line, arcane, flyspeck-perfect commands, some quite long. In 1991, I collected about 25 such little programs and welded them into a package I called DOSFREE. With it, you could literally run your computer without having to issue any DOS commands. It made entering the computer world easier for a lot of beginners. Still today some of us use some of its file management and navigation programs. I believe that I am faster and more accurate with it than with Windows' Explorer. At any rate, it was nostalgic when I saw such onetime power-apps as atsize, size, browse, cmos get, cmos put, dirsort, explosiv, park, prswap, slice, slowdown, and ted, my first Text Editor. I wonder how many in the club remember enough to have enjoyed that walk down Memory Lane with me?