BESTPROG.TXT                   Copyright (c) by Timo Salmi 1991-1999
Sat 9-January-1999

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

There is a huge number of very worthwhile shareware and other
material that is not on this list. Please note that this list is
subjective reflecting my own, special 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.

Although one cannot submit to the list at hand, the gentle authors
might be interested to see http://www.uwasa.fi/http/banners.html for
a page of banners.

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.

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 I have moved the consequently outdated selections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.

asa57d.zip      The As-Easy-As spreadsheet from Trius Inc. The last
                MS-DOS update is from 1996. We only have one
                shareware MS-DOS 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 for an
                MS-DOS user.

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 at garbo.uwasa.fi/Astro.html. 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 later versions can utilize
                the full properties of the video card, thus giving
                very sharp images when the video adapter is capable
                of it. The Windows version, also listed in this
                collection, is one of my favorites.

dc106f.zip      Directory control from the PC-Magazine by Michael
                Mefford from 1989. 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.

dcf53.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 later
                MS-DOS versions.) I had 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 copyq324.zip. This is one of
                the MS-DOS programs that has in no way been outdated
                by the later developments.

dirmat31.zip    Dirmatch for comparing & manipulating two dirs side
                by side. Another really great utility from Michael
                Mefford from the beginning of the 1990's. Originally
                appeared in the PC-Magazine. This is one of the
                programs that has stood the test of time and is
                still as useful in 1999 as it ever was.

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 showed
                no interest whatsoever in the feedback I tried to
                give on the configuration problems with the program.
                Fortunately such a supercilious attitude is not
                common among the authors. (This was earlier. As far
                I know, the author is now on a well-deserved
                retirement.)

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 used 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. This is a
                program that I still often use even if the Windows
                clipboard offers an alternative.

fed165.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
                hex52as.zip.

fp-304.zip      The honors of virus scanning still 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
                originally from the Netherlands. Also highly worth a
                commendation is Stiller's Integrity Master
                anti-virus. See Garbo's /pc/virus directory. (P.S.
                The status of McAfee and TBAV scanners are no longer
                guaranteed at Garbo, since, contrary to Fridrik
                Skulason and Stiller Research, they have ceased any
                interest in keeping Internet FTP archives up to
                date.)

ftp-list.zip    Anonymous FTP FAQ and Site Listing by Perry Rovers.
                Frequently updated, although at turn of 1997 the
                author has had to take a longer break. 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
                maintained. It was /pc/pd2/moder62.zip. Both lists
                were heavily downloaded from Garbo in their time and
                sometimes still are. But at the end of the 1990's
                the times have very much changed. With WWW we have
                moved from centralization to decentralization with a
                page of its own for almost every program. Search
                engines and link services have replaced the ftp site
                lists. In 1999 practically only Simtel.Net actively
                hold the fort for the traditional program
                repositories with a full gamut of operations.

geoclk75.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.

gsz0924.zip     Full-screen version of Zmodem file transfer
                protocol. Chuck Forsberg's Zmodem became 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, and then
                whitled totally after 1996 giving way to Windows
                based FTP and WWW downloading solutions. But the
                program was an establishment. A kind of hall of
                famer. The Zmodem Unix version is available from the
                /unix/zmodem directory.

inter60*.zip    Ralf Brown's MS-DOS Interrupt List still going
                strong as ever. A staggering amount of internal lore
                absolutely essential for each and every serious PC
                programmer. Another definitive reference is the old,
                but not obsolete 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.

nbird40.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 dazzl52b.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 used pcopy 5.0 /pc/miscutil/patriqui.zip
                on my old Zenith XT portable until I scrapped that
                PC. 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. This still holds in 1999. This, incidentally is
                one of the old MS-DOS programs which I continue to
                use each and every day. So much so that I even have
                Doskey macros for it in my autoexec.bat.

pcps831.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.
                Useful, but if one writes with MS-DOS Word, seldom
                needed any more.

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/
                tsedos25.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.
                However, the program is no more available from
                Garbo. As is so familiar for example from the case
                of Monopoly, copyright issues killed this program.

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. One of the programs still current in 1999.

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, even if I also
                use WinZip, although not quite so frequently. 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.
                Unfortunately, Snipper causes problem in an MS-DOS
                box under Windows and I thus use is rather soldom
                any more.

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. The TP updates ceased in 1998
                and the new material is for Delphi.

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 did not draw more attention of the
                programmers. A program that has become outdated by
                the modern, faster PCs.

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. I no more use this program, since my
                terminal usage is now under Windows.

telix351.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.

uuexe656.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 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
mailto:ts@uwasa.fi <http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/>  ; FIN-65101,  Finland
Spam foiling in effect.  My email filter autoresponder will return a
required email password to users not yet in the privileges database.
