BESTPROG.TXT (All rights reserved) Wed 15-May-1996 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 the since discontinued 41223 Dec 17 1995 ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/pd2/author35.zip author35.zip Email addresses of 255 MS-DOS shareware and PD authors Not surprisingly many of the selections that were on the original list were utilities that complemented what the earlier MS-DOS versions lacked. I have moved the consequently outdated selections to a separate file earlybst.txt in this same collection. 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. cshow904.zip Much of the information and even recreation comes in the form of GIF pictures. For example, Garbo 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 improving his program constantly. The recent versions can utilize the full properties of the video card, thus giving very sharp images when the video adapter is capable of it. 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. dcf52.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. A simple but useful alternative to look at is xdcpy200.zip. Another option worth looking at is the more professional copyq322.zip. dirmat31.zip Dirmatch for comparing & manipulating two dirs side by side. Another really great utility from Michael Mefford. Originally appeared in the PC-Magazine. 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 MS-DOS Kermit 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 ftp://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 hex51.zip. fp-219.zip The honors of virus scanning will now 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. Naturally there are other scanners, too, like McAfee's established Scan and 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 heights. 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/ moder58.zip. Both lists are heavily downloaded from Garbo. geoclk70.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. 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. gsz0607.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. The Zmodem Unix version is available from the /unix/zmodem directory. inter50*.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. 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. list91m.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. Unfortunately, the author has been adamantly unresponsive to keeping his utility versions updated at FTP program archives. 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. nbird34.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. Another excellent "show" to watch is dazzl51c.zip. 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. pcps810.zip In an office with laser PostScript printers one needs 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. Comes also as a Unix version. pklts201.zip 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 Info-ZIP 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. tsejr4.zip The SemWare Editor Jr, former QEdit. More than perhaps any other category of programs, the choice of a text editor is a matter of taste. In shareware I have opted for The SemWare Editor, Jr. 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 was corrected in the fully commercial SemWare Editor (TSE). You can get /pc/demo/ tsetd2.zip from Garbo to see a demo version of 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. 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. 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. shez109.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 hard disk. 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 hard disk. 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. Together with its data files a huge amount of Turbo Pascal programming lore for the initiated. Not being bashful I also note here my own tsfaqp.zip collection of Frequently Asked Turbo Pascal Questions. It is by far my most popular file among downloaders. Besides I often use it for reference myself, along SWAG. 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. An example of a very useful target command. It lists all your *.txt files that have the word "garbo" in them. For this you need also a grep.com. Mine comes from a fully commercial package (TP 7.01). TARGET -d *.txt -c"GREP -il garbo &f" | GREP "^File " tcpy203c.zip TurboCopy, Speedy multi-volume file transfer program. It is particularly useful if you often need to copy material from hard disk to floppy or vice versa. A 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 MS-DOS Kermit cannot handle. One of our programmers, Tuomas Eerola, did a great work of adapting the translation tables and sources for Telnet. 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 MS-DOS Kermit. 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. uuexe651.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. n16e12n.exe I am not a keen Windows user, and this an MS-DOS best programs list. Still, I must conclude this list by an obvious Windows selection: The Netscape Navigator for WWW viewing. Beyond version 1.22 there are 2+ beta test versions at the time of updating this text. The 2+ version includes support for the much discussed Java applets language and what appears to be serious security problems. I may be conservative, but I consider the development of Java overrated in importance. Animated home pages are no doubt fancy, but seldom add any real information value. .................................................................... 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