VIRTUAL HOUSE-MOVING

Dick Pountain - 31/10/94 12:20 - PRO COLUMN 3


I always know when a major new operating system version is
coming - it happens whenever I'm finally feeling happy
with my system after at least three years of intensive
fiddling and tuning. It last happened when I was dragged
kicking and screaming from DOS to Windows 3.0 around 1991,
and it's about to happen again with Windows 95. I prefer
to believe that what I'm feeling is not the onset of
senile timidity but rather a 'creeping feature overload'
that others might share.

Curiously enough there was a time when I actually used to
look forward to OS upgrades. Those were the frontier days
when DOS was so primitive that each new version added
features that you really NEEDED. Does anyone else remember
the transition from DOS 1 to DOS 2, which introduced
hierarchical directories? If not, can you imagine what it
was like to manage a hard disk WITHOUT hierarchical
directories?

Sometime around version 3, DOS became stable enough for a
horde of talented programmers to embark on TSR (terminate
and stay resident) utilities and applications that really
made a difference to the way you used your PC. For example
Norton's Utilities offered the ability to undelete files;
that took two more versions to get built into DOS. What
you had in effect was a mix-and-match operating system.
You wanted multitasking? Get Desqview. You needed file
compression? ARC and ZIP at your service. Faster screen
scrolling? Try Cruise Control. The downside was that your
AUTOEXEC.BAT grew to about 500 lines long and you spent a
lot of time tracking down obscure interactions and
crashes. But after about three years you had a system that
worked the way you liked and got your jobs done fast.

Then came Windows 3.0 which was supposed to simplify
everything. The same look-and-feel for all applications;
multitasking; a uniform channel for data exchange via the
Clipboard, or even DDE for the adventurous; WYSIWYG
editing and printing. Problem was I couldn't stomach its
clunky user interface, with separate program and file
managers and an 'everything-has-to-be-in-a-window'
attitude. Pretty soon I discovered alternative shells like
Backmenu, Norton Desktop for Windows, and finally Wintools
which I still use. Wintools lets me put 'alias' icons for
frequently used data files, directories and programs onto
a large virtual desktop so I can design my own ideal
workspace. Oh and I now have 800 lines of WIN.INI and
SYSTEM.INI as well as AUTOEXEC.BAT....

I've yet to discover a Windows word-processor that does
everything my old DOS package PC Write did, and hence my
overall productivity has barely increased since I was
finally forced (for professional reasons) to abandon plain
DOS. I find Microsoft Word handy for the occasional posh
letter, but too slow, clumsy and distracting for me to
write and think at the same time. Which is why I'm writing
this article in Norton's minimalist Desktop Editor
(intended for editing batch files) with a heap of Recorder
macros that implement the PC Write features I miss most.
Nearly - but infuriatingly, not quite - all of these
macros work within other Windows applications too, even
within dialogs. I should explain that WYSIWYG counts for
almost nothing with me as all the magazines I write for
prefer to receive plain ASCII text files via email - I've
become a one-man paperless office whose printer doesn't
get plugged in from one month to the next. Similarly I've
no desire to embed pictures in text - the last thing art
editors want is for me to start designing pages - so I
just send zipped PCX files.

Communication is something I do a lot of, but again my
work pattern isn't 'typical'. I never surf the
superhighway for fun (I find the tarmac scuffs my
paintjob) and don't archive lots of CIX conferences or
Usenet groups, so fancy off-line readers like WigWam and
Ameol leave me cold. Instead I've built my own little
automated sending and archiving system for email, using
Wintools and MicroLink scripts. I was even driven to write
my own diary program in Visual Basic, because of the
feature overload of commercial offerings like Lotus
Organizer. Soon I'll be knitting my own muesli too.

In effect I've built my own virtual office inside the PC,
and I'm very happy in it. The physical office may be
cluttered with piles of dusty old magazines and software,
but on the other side of that glass screen is a tidy and
organized realm where I work every day. What worries me is
that migrating to Windows 95 may become the virtual
equivalent of moving house, now known to be one of the
most stressful activities in modern life.

Perhaps you are thinking "just settle for Microsoft Office
like everyone else in the world and you won't have a
problem". And you'd be sort of right, except that this is
exactly what Microsoft would like you to think. And dammit
I actually ENJOY picking out the best of the utilities
that pass through my hands and bolting them together - the
virtual equivalent of building a mock-Gothic roof
extension, or a yacht in my backyard.

All I really want from Microsoft is for them to fix the
task and memory management to stop all those accursed
protection errors and resource famines, and to provide a
compact and elegant mechanism for integrating and
automating ANY applications to replace all my assorted
macros and scripts. OLE 2 isn't going to fill that bill
for some time since few of my currently favored
applications are OLE enabled yet, and to judge from the
caustic comments I'm getting from developers, some of them
never will be. And I certainly don't want a new shell
that's less capable than the one I have. Mustn't grumble
though, I expect I'll have it all sorted again by 1997.