On Tue, Jul 08, 2014 at 01:55:59PM -0700, Joseph S Barrera III wrote:
Do you have a list of essential DOS software? And where
to get it from?
I'm resurrecting a mid-90s laptop (500MB disk, 8MB RAM) and I
remember how slow and painful Windows 95 was on it. I'm looking at
rebuilding it as a strictly DOS machine. I have copies of several
Microsoft DOS apps (I worked there at the time) but I'm curious what
else you have in your toolkit.
Well I think we each build a little nest to fit our own personal needs.
So for me the most important things are Turbo Assembler V5.0 (which I
bought back when that was still possible -- there was talk of making it
freeware ages ago but AFAIK that stagnated) and the OpenWatcom collection
(V1.9 is available for free from
www.openwatcom.org). Other than that
I use a lot of homegrown stuff that's of interest only to me -- a text
editor that I started writing using EDLIN in 1983 (and is now built in to
E11), terminal program, MAKE replacement, PIC programmer stuff, etc.
Each program has the 5% of a commercial program's features that I would
ever actually use, plus a bunch of stuff I needed that the commercial
programs don't have. I'll bet lots of people do the same ... especially
when they have three decades to do it.
John Wilson
D Bit