> I'm thinking about doing a video that shows how to do real work on > DOS. I sometimes see comments on YouTube with people asking "could > you really do *work* with DOS?" And the answer is of course you can, > that happened every day. > > So I'm collecting a list of things you'd do in the 80s and 90s with > DOS to do work. Sure, I'll put a game it two in there, but I'm > focusing on getting work done. > > What programs or types of programs would you like to see?
In the early 80's, I worked in an Engineering department where a bunch of us shared a single XT-class computer. The main applications we used at the time were PC-Write (an early word processor) and Lotus 1-2-3. We also had a secretary in the front of the office that used an IBM word processor (I think it was called DisplayWrite, but I don't remember for sure) to write "official" reports. I do remember it used EBCDIC instead of ASCII. And back in those days everything was transferred back and forth with floppies. Later on everybody ended up getting their own networked computer on their desk. We still mostly used PC-Write and Lotus 1-2-3, but we sometimes used other programs also. The Company used an IBM mainframe for all the central services, and one of the main applications everybody used was a DOS program called Extra! by AttachMate which gave us access to the mainframe from our PCs. One of the big projects I worked on was working with the mainframe programmers to create a database to keep track of some of the Engineering systems we worked on. While the mainframe did a good job of maintaining the data, the only kinds of reports you could run from the mainframe were the "canned" reports which would be printed on paper. I often needed to create special/custom reports or use special filters on the data. I figured out ways to manipulate Extra! or DOS to extract the data I needed so I could manipulate it to get what I wanted. That need was the main reason I ending up writing the first version of my PRTSCR TSR program, which essentially does a "screen scrape" of the text on the DOS terminal and sends it to a file instead of to a printer. Another early TSR program I worked on was JOYKEYS, which turns joystick movements and button presses into keystrokes. At the time I had some joysticks on my computer at home and thought a joystick might be useful as an input device for lots of different programs besides games. It was a similar situation with my MOUSKEYS program, which turns mouse movements and button presses into keystrokes. This allows you to use a mouse with almost any DOS program even if it wasn't originally designed to use a mouse. Of course, using either a joystick or a mouse in a program that wasn't originally designed to use them as an input device has a lot of limitations that a fully-integrated implementation could overcome, but can still be useful in certain situations. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
