[mdip]

I'm with you there -- IIRC, the 3.x series was all about hard disks. I'd lean toward 3.31, though, personally as the "Everything(TM)" item since (I think) that was the version that shipped with FAT16 (had to hit up Wikipedia and this was the version that supported partitions over 32MB). I remember, as a kid, that we had to have 2 partitions on our drive because of the version of DOS not supporting partitions greater than that size and that this was a problem for us for a while (how long, not sure, I was young, could have been years but was probably months), so it seemed like it was a pain point that was overdue for where software was heading, even then[0].

It was also when I started to feel the age of the 8088 I was running it on and was the first version of an OS that I wrote something 'difficult' that I thought was 'really cool' using assembler. I was very young, so cool had a wildly different definition than it has today. What I wrote was a TSR (terminate and stay ready -- something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a background app) that made a ball-like character bounce around the screen after a random number of minutes, really fast* for a second (just long enough for you to maybe question what you saw)[1].

It was a horrible pain of C, some assembler, and -- of course the mess of pirated software that claimed to be something of a compiler and a development environment but I found most of them were designed to simply return indecipherable errors (or -- error codes -- sometimes literally just exit codes), it took me weeks, but it's the reason I stopped begging for a C64, Mac, Amiga or any of the other platforms that had far more fun things to do with them at the time.

[0] Some never forget being told '640K is more than you'll ever need' (yes, partial or misquote, but it's exactly what the guy who sold us that first 8088 told us) -- I'll never forget the incredible controversy that happened when OS/2 2.1 came out and it was something like ~30MB installed! We had a FULL height 350MB SCSI drive at the time (a cool $1,600 controller, cable, terminators, drive and all), so I was a little spoiled. I was still always almost full all the time but, hey, what can you do.

[1] I got the idea from a rumor I had heard about a software virus of the time that did something similar. Mine didn't spread -- it had to be edlin'ed into the AUTOEXEC.BAT. I named it something non-obvious since my dad was proficient enough to go snooping around (it may have even been something in the more l33t CONFIG.SYS).

[mthoms]

It's been awhile but didn't TSR stand for Terminate and Stay Resident rather than Terminate and Stay Ready?

Your comment brought back some great memories, thanks :)

[mdip]

"Resident" is correct, and I am not :).

Honestly, I think I've always referred to it as Terminate and Stay Ready; probably something I read in one of those old books that used to adorn the bookshelf of my parent's office.

Writing it brought back a lot of memories, as well - glad someone enjoyed it! It's amazing to think that we used to write programs in ways other than "I don't know how to do this" (performs google search) "I know how to do this now", but rather had to pour through books, forums (on dial-up BBSes and what qualified as equivalents in the early Internet days) and acquiring that little nugget of knowledge felt like it had so much more value, even though the reality is that the value was the same, it just took a lot more effort.

[stevekemp]

I wrote a couple of TSR programs too, nothing too advanced, but it was a fun time to be learning and experimenting.

I suspect the most useful thing I wrote was a simple "undeleter" program, for recovering deleted files from floppies and drives. Unmarking the FAT-entry as deleted, then chasing blocks to reassemble the file.