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What old favorites live on your hard disk? How old is your oldest? Can you still remember what they do?
By Andrew Pollack on 10/19/2007 at 11:21 PM EDTSome of these may be older than some of you reading this blog.
I was going through the file system on my laptop as part of generally cleaning it up. I do that once in a while -- removing old junk, uninstalling software I tried once and didn't like, generally putting things to rights. Anyway, as I was looking at the file system, I came across a directory I've copied from machine to machine for quite a while now. In fact, I've copied this little directory full of utilities through more upgrades than I can count.
These are some of the oldest . Yes, I do still remember what each one does -- but I'll admit that its been a long time since "c:\util;" was the first entry in my PATH statement.
My favorite in this list has to be the "Mark" and its partner "Release". These were used in the MS DOS 3 days. You would load "Mark" then you could run your TSR's like "Sidekick", and if you ever needed the memory back you just ran "Release" and it would clear out your TSR programs and give you back the RAM.
So, check those drives. Do you really have those old utilities? Are you geek enough?
the complete copy of WordStar and all the bad fiction I wrote in college. The
date on it is 1987. :-)
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I, too, have a c:\util directory. Poking around in there I find a bunch of .bat
files I wrote to cd me to directories I haven't used in decades. I find a
couple of bat files wrappering PVCS commands that I haven't needed since the
mid-90s. A C program I wrote to count source file lines (excluding comments and
whitespace) from 1990. A grep.exe from 1990.
And 3 gems: rendir.com (1986), disk.com (1985) and whereis.com (1984)