M.R.E. INFORMATION FILE. The purpose of this file is to provide users of this program with some insight and information about the author of StS, my company, and a brief history of the program. My name is Emery Wooten and I am a 35 year old graduate of Mississippi State University's college of Mechanical Engineering. I currently own a home here in West Point, Ms. and also own and operate a machine shop where our primary business is industrial maintenance and design work. I first became involved with computer programming in the mid 1970's while in college. Back then it was punch cards and FORTRAN IV on a Univac that stayed broke most of the time. Being mechanically inclined and having worked with machines most of my life, I was instantly "hooked" on this wonderful piece of junk. In my primary line of work (machinist) when you made a mistake your efforts usually wound up in the scrap pile, so the fact that I could debug and edit programs after only a few short hours of fighting keypunch machines and hungry card readers was probably one of the most fascinating aspects of the machine. I have yet to overcome my fasciation with computers. The procedural logic and the thrill of seeing your finished product work make for a natural transition from my skilled trade and engineering roots. When the IBM-PC was introduced in 1981, I bought one. I thought it was great that I could have a "personal computer" and hey, NO PUNCH CARDS! Now I am your curious type, the science and technology type of person, who reads Scientific American, enjoys The Discovery Channel, and thinks kids with orange hair should seek medical attention immediately. I tore into that IBM-PC from both the hardware and software sides of it. I wrote programs and built interface boards, modified the ROM code, and performed an assortment of other radical things. Hey, at one time I had that computer believing that I built it instead of IBM! In any event, I learned a great deal about how it worked and how to program it. I adopted assembler language as my primary means of communication with the PC. It was the obvious choice to satisfy my interests and MASM 1.00 was how I started down the road that leads to this text file. In 1982-83 I found myself making the transition from BASIC/FORTRAN programming into the deep dark world of machine language. I had heard it was hell to learn and use so naturally I dove into it full force. What I discovered was that assembler language was in fact the most logical and powerful language I had ever encountered. It wasn't (and still isn't) that hard to master, and the absolute power it provides to the programmer is addictive. My problem was that at that time, I could find no text editor that suited my liking. Well, to make a long story short, I wrote The E88 Text Editor and started using it to do all my programming with. Around about mid 1984 The E88 Text Editor version 1.00 was completed and I was using it solely for my own purposes when some friends of mine got a look at it and urged me to market the program. I looked into several marketing strategies and decided that the shareware concept made the most sense and best fit my general philosophy about computer software. The way I see it, most all software is shareware anyway. I would be willing to bet that 99% of the people reading this file at least looked at or even used most of the so called "commercial" software packages they now own. Shareware represents honesty on both the part of the users and sellers. As a producer, I didn't want to put some kind of "guilt trip" on people because they were using a "pirate" copy of my program. I knew from my own personal experience that people who had the opportunity to "try before they buy" were going to do it anyway, so why not encourage them to do it and let them feel good about it. As a user, I also knew that of the programs I had tried and found useful, I bought. I can appreciate the effort that goes into writing software and believe in paying for what I use. I also think that most of the people who use computers at any kind of serious level also feel the same way. So enter M.R.E. Software, a shareware company. I posted E88 on a few BBS systems around the area and in a couple of months I started receiving letters and registration forms. What I found was a wealth of ideas from a bunch of good people. I took this user input and began updating and changing E88. It is now at version 4.22 and climbing. As the program became more widespread and my user base grew, I realized the need to install a BBS system to provide user support and provide a convenient means for users to register. To get the BBS system operational required the help of a friend, Tom Ford, to set-up and sysop the board. With Tom as sysop, I was free to continue programming without worrying about taking care of the intricacies of BBS operations. Now everybody knows that with BBS systems and computer communications one must deal with compressed files. With Tom on the BBS and me accessing it daily, we were up to our necks in .ARC files. So I had created (as often happens) a new problem, or at the very least agitated an old one. I kept most of my less used programs on my system as .ARC files to save space. Every time I wanted to run some of these programs I had to "dig out" PKXARC and un-arc the files into a clean sub-directory. I had one game in particular that I enjoyed fooling with, it must have had 75 files associated with it. I had to find a better way to handle the situation, so I wrote a program to do it. I called it ARCOM ... meaning ARC Commander. Two weeks after releasing ARCOM, news of the lawsuit between System Enhancements Associates and Phil Katz was released and shocked the shareware world. This lawsuit was soon settled with the net result being that the PK series of archiving programs could no longer use the .ARC format. Since ARCOM supported PKARC exclusively, I knew that its days were numbered and that I had to release an update. What I decided, was to completely eliminate the ARC name association my program carried, enhance its shell capabilities, and name it Stereo Shell. What you now have here is the fourth real update to Stereo Shell. The major changes, improvements and additions are outlined in the included file CHANGES.TXT. This version represents just one of what I hope to be a long continuing sequence of updates as has been the case with E88. I plan to support StS and try to keep it current with the changing conditions in the evolving file compression utility and DOS shell market. ---- It is now June 1993 and I am updating this and all the other text and document files in preparation for the release of StS version 4.10. StS has undergone some significant changes since its original release as ARCOM and M.R.E. Software is changing as well. In July 1990 I took over the the BBS where I still serve as Sysop. Tom Ford, who created and ran the BBS for two years, did a good job but tired of what can sometimes be a thankless chore. We also had some problems in the past with having the BBS located remotely from the office and decided that relocating it and changing the decor would be in our best interests. Tom is now a remote sysop, frequent caller, and "BS artist" on the system, the difference being that he is now operating remotely and doing it at his leisure instead of as a spare time job. I hope that you have found this information of interest. I included it in an effort to help answer some of your questions about who and what M.R.E. Software is all about and where we will be tomorrow. I guess I can sum it up by saying that we are a small software company located in a nice, quiet, small, but ever growing, southern town. Its operated by a guy who has some very stable business roots and will be here tomorrow. I would like to express my gratitude to my many friends and supporters who have helped make StS and my other programs possible and successful. This may be serious business, but it sure is fun! Enjoy this program, and yawl have a nice day... -Emery Wooten-