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Hotkey nostalgia

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MilesAhead:
I just realized one of the reasons I like these Hotkey utilities so much!!  They remind me of those TSR programs in Dos.  With Dos you could only run one program at a time. One way to have small utilities available without quiting your application was to code them as TSRs or Terminate and Stay Resident.  You hit a hotkey and the TSR screen would pop up in front of the app you were using.  You did whatever the utility did, then it popped back down and you resumed using the main application.

I wrote a couple of small ones myself in assembler just to learn how to do it. I think one was an ASCII chart.. that loaded and saved its data to a file instead of generating it. Just to learn how to do file i/o without trashing the system.  Back then PC Magazine had assembler TSR source code for a utility in just about every issue.  There was one esp. good one that monitored keyboard, video mode change, file i/o, timer interrupt, as well as the famous "InDos Flag."  Following the author's suggestion I stripped out the guts and used the monitoring framework as the template for my TSRs.

Oh well, there wasn't that much exotic programming you could do on an XT clone with 640K and a 12" amber monitor. It was kind of a challenge. :)

The other thing I missed were the old bootable Dos diskette utilities.  Now I find out it isn't difficult to make bootable USB key drives.. so the more stuff changes.... :)

I'm still waiting for my 8 GB USB key to arrive in the mail.  :)

mouser:
i remember those TSR hotkey tools.. they were very very cool.

there was one really famous one for DOS, but i can't remember the name of it.. Maybe made by Norton?

MilesAhead:
I think the most famous was Borland Sidekick.  I never had it myself but that was like the killer TSR app at least for 8086.  Also there was a task swapper thing I had.  I forget the name of it.  But it had a TSR module that did the swapping, and you could switch between 4 ordinary Dos apps if they weren't too memory hungry.  It would just park the non-active ones out to disk.  You hit some hotkey to show you the sessions you had saved and you picked the program to resume. It actually worked pretty well if you didn't do anything like programming that would crash your machine.

mouser:
Borland Sidekick!! That was the one!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SideKick

MilesAhead:
The other cool thing I never got to try was this Dos Extender thing. It wasn't VM86 but some other one.  I read a magazine review were they said it actually worked very well.  It required a 386 CPU and a minimum of 4 MB ram.  It flipped on protected mode and actually used demand paged virtual memory to run your Dos programs.  Pretty wild.

The one thing that was kind of fun I remember there was some library or bunch of functions you could use that "stole" memory from your graphics card and you could use it like expanded memory.  The graphics card memory region was dormant as long as you kept the monitor in console mode.  If you let a program switch to a graphics mode though, everything got totally hosed and you usually had to cycle the power.  Great fun on the cheap. :)

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