Since I could think of lots of utilities that I used to use, I realized that I have become somewhat of a dinosaur. In that respect, at least I can accommodate the theme of this issue by describing some of those old utilities and perhaps giving a slant on how they have evolved.

The one I used most was Mem. Mem was totally necessary for DOS 4.0 and later versions. It gave you a list of the programs and (more important) the device drivers present in your computer’s memory. By using Mem, plotting your memory management strategy, editing your Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files, rebooting and running Mem again, you could with some labor, come up with a memory configuration that would allow you to run Windows 3.1 and do some rudimentary multitasking before your system crashed.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time Laplink provided me with my first computer network long before I knew what one was. It came with my Epson laptop. The package included a floppy disk and a cable with four serial connectors (two on each end — one 9 pin and one 25 pin.) If you installed the Device Driver program on your desktop PC and ran the Laplink controller program on the laptop, you could access the hard drive on the desktop from the laptop. Since my desktop PC had a huge (20 megabyte) hard drive, and my laptop had two floppy drives, I hooked them together so I could save data to the new 3 1/2'” floppy disks that only my laptop possessed.

Lynx is a Unix utility that provided some of my first views into the Internet. Before I had ever seen a browser or knew what the term meant (I had heard the term “Mosaic” batted around, but was clueless as to what it did), I used Lynx to find a good deal on a flight to Argentina. Lynx was simple to learn but hard to use. All you had to do was to type “Lynx” on the command line, plus the URL that you wanted to access. Of course, if you were looking for http:// www.thisandthatandotherthings.com/ thisfolder/thisfile.htm, typing the URL could be a bit cumbersome, especially if you happened to mistype, say the final “m”. Why would mistyping the final “m” pose a problem? Because Lynx did not allow you to back up and make corrections. Therefore, if you mistyped the final “m”, you had to retype the entire URL. You even had to make sure that all the capitals and lower-case letters were just as the URL prescribes. Unix, after all, is case-specific. The upside of Lynx is that it allowed you to surf the 'Net with local drive speed. The lack of graphics was not then a problem because not many Web sites had graphics, and those that did seldom embedded their text in graphics files.

An elder statesman that is still around is the venerable PKZip. This program was critical to productivity in the floppy disk days, especially when we started to use programs that handled or included graphics. Even the PKZip that ran via the DOS command line was reasonably easy to use, with a tiny help file that showed you all the options you could include in your command line and how to state that command. Now I use PKZip to archive files on documentation servers and to compress entire manuals to be placed on Zip disks.

Very early in my career as a technical writer I nearly washed out because of my lack of visual depth perception. Why? Because in the early 90’s we had to do print screens of each program screen on a 24 pin dot matrix printer, cut out the screen and paste it on the page, then copy the page on the copier to get a master for that page of the manual. Since I had no depth perception, I couldn’t tell whether the screen was straight or not. Often, my screens were the latter. You can imagine my joy when I discovered the free utility called Txt2PCX. Txt2PCX was a screen capture utility that allowed you to make a graphic copy of the screen and paste it into a graphics box in WordPerfect. It did save my career, but its use was not without grief. Requiring a whopping 2 megabytes of RAM, it sometimes would lock up my system, and sometimes rendered the screens to garbage.

Txt2PCX captured screen colors, but unfortunately, most printers at the time lived in a black-and-white world. This could cause real problems if lavender or light green were rendered to an almost-invisible shade of gray. This problem could be mitigated by the Windows 3.1 utility, PC Paintbrush. Paintbrush could convert a Txt2PCX screen capture to a monochrome bitmap, then back to .PCX format, leaving most of the visible areas of the represented screen visible.

A tremendous improvement to Txt2PCX was Hijaak. Hijaak captured screens which you could convert to any number of graphic formats. The downside was that you had to convert each screen from its native Hijaak format before you could use it. When you are working with dozens of screens, it can become a bit cumbersome. And Hijaak was also responsible for a fair number of system lockups. But you could tell Hijaak not to capture screen colors, eliminating the intermediate conversions necessary for color screens captured with Txt2PCX.

The biggest improvement in screen capture capability came with a new program (at the time, something of a utility itself) called Windows. Starting with the 3.1 version, Windows did a fair job of multitasking with the limited resources found on 386 computers. With 4 megabytes of memory, it would allow you to run a word processing program (such as WordPerfect 5.1) and another application (as long as it had a small memory footprint) at the same time. The advantage of this setup is a feature that is still one of the most useful features of Windows: the Clipboard. By running my applications through Windows, I could capture a text-based screen (almost all screens were text at the time) as text, and with the right font and box setup in WordPerfect, I could plop that screen capture directly into the word processor without any further labor. The text-based screen captures served a tremendous advantage because being text based, they kept the word processing file very small. They could be placed in a one-cell table instead of a graphics box, and if the programmers later made minor changes to the screens, I could edit the text on my represented screens without having to recapture them.

A handy utility that has existed in Windows since the 95 edition is called Annotate. Ask any Windows user if they ever heard of Annotate and (although it still exists in all Windows programs) they will probably give you a blank stare. But if you ask someone who develops Windows help systems, a fair percentage of them will admit to its use.

Annotate is a Windows feature that allows you to add your own notes and comments to a help system. Right-clicking any help screen brings up a menu one item of which is called Annotate. Selecting that option brings up a little box that allows you to type text and save it. When you view the same help screen again, a green paper clip appears on the screen. Clicking the paper clip displays the annotate screen with its current contents.

The limitation of Annotate of course is that not many people use online help systems (can't say as I blame them--most are useless). Another similar program called Jot-It offered more flexibility. You could place electronic post-it notes on any feature of your screen--menu items, help systems, documents, and so forth. Jot-it claimed to run on Windows 3.1 with a system that had as little as 4 megabytes of RAM, but I can guarantee that the peace of such an arrangement was tenuous. Jot-It did serve a useful purpose when run over Windows 95. Jot-It can still be had for $5.95 at http://www.softlet.com/jotitposstyl.html. The site does not mention whether the software is compatible with Windows 98 or later versions of Windows.

Reviewing this article, I began to realize why I couldn't think of any currently-used utilities. Most of these utilities (or similar features) have been incorporated into, disabled by, or replaced by features of Windows. I'll leave it up to you to determine the meaning of this trend and its possible effects on the software industry.