What I miss from the 16 bit days in Windows 64 bit

The recently passed away Vernon Buerg's list.com:

To try the original in dosbox (without piping functionality), get it from http://garbo.uwasa.fi/pub/pc/fileutil/listp96x.zip

EDIT:

Ideas on how to the the original LIST.COM to perform theoretically in 64 bit prompt:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/16-bit-COM-support-for-64-bit-windows-cmd-with-INT-21h-directory-change

can you link to/describe what the program did to begin with? It looks like a poor man's Commander

I am glad 16bit is dead. Maybe now microsoft can quit supporting the old 8.3 file names. Without the threat of having only 64bit machines approval to spend years converting our 16bit code to .net would have been hard to come by.

H

I miss dialup-BBSs...

@evildictaitor:

Yeah it's crazy to think we're still using BIOS on most PCs.  It was out-of-date maybe 20+ years ago.  Or whenever hard drives went over 540 megs or whatever the boot limit was.

Do we really need to maintain compatibility with ancient operating systems?

@CreamFilling512:

My first computer with a hard drive (circa 1988 + or - a year or 2) could only see 32 MB of the 40 MB hard drive. There was some software that I ran after the computer booted and after the O/S loaded so I could get to the left over 8 MB of hard drive space. On more advanced computers a few years later, I also had to write down the hard drive specifications before installing the hard drive so I could enter the information such as number of heads, and other things that I can't recall, otherwise it might not work, or I would'nt get the full capacity of the drive.

My Pentium III could only work with hard drives up to 80 GB in size.

@Proton2:

Yes, that brings back memories.  I had one of those machines with a 40 MB drive partitioned into 32MB and 8MB partitions to get around that problem.  I also had to many times record the hard drive info to enter during setup -- heads, tracks, blocks, sectors... even the list of bad sectors in the early days of hard drives.  It still was a huge step forward though. 

1 day ago, androidi wrote

The recently passed away Vernon Buerg's list.com:

A great program.  I still had a copy on my computer until a couple of years ago when I went to x64.

I missed my DOS games, especially the PAL. I hope they could port PAL into .NET with proper Sound Blaster 16bits quality of music translation. They made the Win95 version, but, the music just doens't sound the same.

3 hours ago, Heywood_J wrote

*snip*

A great program.  I still had a copy on my computer until a couple of years ago when I went to x64.

I'm still trying to work out what it actually does, I mean I presume it's something more than just:

Get-ChildItem | Format-Wide -Column 5

Though I'm not entirely sure what.

@AndyC: Depends on the user, it had few functions but the one I used was what you see on the shot. If you have dosbox, get it from http://garbo.uwasa.fi/pub/pc/fileutil/listp96x.zip and try yourself, I'll describe it here otherwise.

Poor analogy: Disable Intellisense from VS and you could say the experience is similar as if you deleted list.com from dos. Everything still works, Intellisense "doesn't do anything". Better analogy: use cd/dir instead of windows explorer. Using list is just faster for navigation compared to dir/cd <tab completion>/windows explorer (when you need to work on the prompt a lot, which isn't unheard of from developers).

I tried a good bunch of alternative text-mode directory navigator programs and none of them are nearly as efficient. Other then-popular functions of list were file viewing/hex viewer and typical windows explorer file management functions but those to me were really secondary fluff/bloat, performed better by dedicated tools. List.com was to me the dedicated complete replacement for cd & dir. (except Dir /s - which can be piped into the l.com viewer: dir /s | l )

Typical usage (assume unknown and complicated path names):

C:\a\b\c\>l<enter> (l.com, single .com file, in the PATH)

<arrow-left/right (switch column), arrow/page-up/down, home, end, enter(to change folder or open file)>

x (exits l.com into the directory that was last visible)

c:\X\y\z\t\>

l file / <enter> in the navigator opened the text/hex viewer and e opened file in editor.

Of course it could also do the usual stuff: show and change file dates/sort, attributes. But the ability to show a lot of folders & files, navigate using all arrow keys between columns (not just up& down) is the one I care about.

The piping function mentioned does not work in dosbox. In vmware, the dos version I have requires use like: dir /s | l cmd0  - doesn't work without that cmd0.

Tell me about another text-mode folder/file navigation tool that shows as much folders/filers as you see, by default, as efficiently, and allows as efficient navigation in it to select the stuff. I'll check it out if it works in the windows 64 bit cmd prompt (not just PS prompt).

I thought this would be an interesting thing to do, so I hacked this together yesterday evening:

It's a very simple .Net 4 app that does some of the basics of Androidi's description of list.com. You can navigate directories and when it exits it leaves you in the selected directory (though this requires you to launch it via the included nav.cmd script, because a process cannot modify the current directory of its parent process; something that was possible in DOS for list.com by using int 21h).

Although it doesn't have a viewer (neither hex nor text), it does offer the following

• Easy navigation via arrow keys, PgUp/PgDn/Home/End
• Search for file/folder names in the current folder.
• View file/folder info
• Open a file (uses ShellExecute, so just does the default action)
• Open a new command or explorer window in the selected folder
• Copy the selected file/folder name to the clipboard
• Navigate to a path that's on the clipboard
• Customizable colors and column count
• Favorites
• Browsing history with CTRL-left/right arrow

Just press F1 or ? to see a list of keyboard shortcuts.

Because this was hacked together fairly quickly it's a bit rough around the edges (particularly if you resize the console window you need to refresh the display before it updates properly; I couldn't find a way around that). I also don't guarantee it doesn't have some horrible bugs.

And look, it works under Linux with mono (that's an SSH session into a Debian server):

Obviously some of the options (such as opening a cmd.exe or explorer.exe window) don't entirely work under Linux.

Download here!

Source is included (the whole thing is under BSD license), but again, this was hacked together fairly quickly, don't expect super high-quality code or anything. Let me know what you think.

Trying it out now, the one I started working on is not release quality yet (and would be win-only). If I shall mention couple things that are on my todo list (sort of done but need fixing & testing):

Scaling the number of columns in based on win width + length of the names visible on first page & load only the first page of results (optionally background load further results). Net 4.0 has the enumdirectories thing for this but I want to target 2.0 so I went for pinvokes.

I didn't spec the page up/down earlier but the original list does it "vertically", ie. all the columns change on each press. 

I'm trying to have more of the file names fit, the "..." seems wasteful and doesn't look too good. I just hard clip them right at the column border. I may do some full length file name view somewhere but finding the best way to do it will take some experimenting.

In the original list if you press keys 1,2,3 or 4 it switched between views:

1 column:
name mm/dd/yyyy mm:ss A---- (only Archive is set, not hidden/system/readonly)

2 column:
name mm/dd/yyyy mm:ss ASHR | name mm/dd/yyyy mm:ss A---

3 column:

name mmddyy | name mmddyy | name mmddyy

and 4 for 4 column view - which was ok for the DOS and 8.3 names. With long names I prefer max 3 column without dates if the window is 80 width, otherwise scale depending on window width.

I like the history & favorites ideas. It's well done and I'll have to do some evaluation whether to just tweak your code to match the original list or continue on my version. While they perform same function my goal has been more in copying the original more accurately by looking at it in dosbox.

btw I just realized that one big improvement in explorer over list was the ability to press keys corresponding to how a file/folder name starts, and it jumps there. (haven't looked at the exact logic).I use it so much that I have to look at how it could be added. Maybe some type of toggle which would allow the original key functions behind shift.

nvm

haha! Now I feel nostalgic to fire up the C=64 emulator...

I do miss 20K OSes, and a memory map, that I can kinda understand, and still remember.

POKE 1024, 32

lol