Who remembers writing .bat files?

Post Reply New Topic

I started writing them when I was seven or eight. I tried to use qbasic when I was nine.

I was experimenting with .bat files a few years a go to turn off/on windows services. never really went further then that.

I remember fiddling around with DOS batch files in primary school. I believe my favourite trick was to mess around with autoexec.bat. Later on when I knew some x86 assembly and basic I would use it to load 'prank' type programs, just silly little things like messing around with ASCII so that the network welcome messages came out funny and little things like that.

I worked for Gateway computers in North Sioux City, SD from 1995 to 1998 as on the phone technical support and worked daily with DOS batch files. Anything DOS, come to think of it.
Of course, time goes by and other things filled my mind, but if I thought hard enough about it I could probably rip off an 'autoexec.bat' pretty easily.

but I wouldn't want to.


Merle

I've written .bat files before, and autorun.inf files.

I remember batch files. When I was kid, I used to write them a lot, although now I can't imagine why I would have.

Back in the pre-readily available internet days, I ran a BBS (or Bulletin Board System, for those of you too young to remember) that was a FidoNet node. With all the different software used to run the BBS, I had to write all kinds of batch files, as well as writing them for other purposes. For the bulletin board alone, I had enough lines of code to make a novel. It got to the point that I was doing things in batch files that "common wisdom" said couldn't be done. I actually still use them to a limited extent even now.

As someone mentioned text editors, my favorite back in the day was TED, or Tiny Editor, a free utility put out by PC Magazine. This program lived up to its name, doing a lot while taking up a minimal amount of disk space. On top of that, it had a nice, clean interface that would let you fly through tasks.

(I no longer have a copy of this program, and haven't had any luck finding it. So, if anyone out there still has a copy and wants to share, you'd make a person happy...)

Peace.

JM

I always just used the basic DOS 'EDIT' program. I used that for my little x86 routines as well.

DOS is awsome!! ! but it sucks... i much rather have something run off of hexidecimal than binary

There isn't a computer in existence that runs off hex, it's all binary. Hex is just a convenient representation of binary data.

True processing is binary but I think memory chips still use hex based storage because it uses fewer transistors and it merely decodes/encodes at its interface.

I wrote a Unix emulator using MS-DOS BAT files once...

well i rather have it read the hexidecimal system, but be built off the binary system

Well all machine code is binary but most assembly languages use hex as it is more convinient for human programmers.

Hex is more convenient than decimal as it is relatively easy to convert hex to binary but more of a pain to convert decimal to binary as 16 is a power of two.

I really, really hate MSDOS batch files. I had to try to use them after I was used to writing shell scripts for various other OSes. The MSDOS stuff was so pathetic. They stole ideas from CP/M, didn't implement them properly, eventually upgraded it all to look a bit more like Unix, but didn't get that right either. Awful.

Then there was QBASIC. Lovely. A freebie programming language. Not perfect, but pretty good. And somewhere down the line, MS stopped supplying it. I used to copy the .exe file around with me onto the versions of Windows that had dropped it (was it dropped before or after W95?).

Afraid not. HexAdecimal has no place at all down at the hardware level.

There is an argument that implies that a ternary system is marginally more efficient, and some hardware was even built, in Russia. It never caught on.

The only thing you'll run into is tristate, but that doesn't mean what it sounds like. I.e. it's not having three values per digit, it's having the binary 0 and 1, plus "I don't know/care".

IIRC it was after W95.