Word: hacker
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last week the Hacker was busy talking about Macintosh utilities. It's nice to have a program that can help the computer famous for its terminal cuteness wink and blink in style...
...principle behind batch files is fairly simple. Instead of typing in several commands from DOS, a user can instruct the computer to take its commands from a pre-arranged file. For example, when the Happy Hacker wants to use DBASE, he simply types in db at the A prompt. This instructs the computer to execute all of the commands in the file DB.BAT stored on disk. Upon looking at the Hacker's DB.BAT file, the IBM compatible then knows to do the following things. Load in Sidekick (a handy calculator/notepad utility), create a ramdisk, activate a print spooling utility, switch...
...called autoexec.bat. This is an ASCII file (constructed like any other batch file) which tells a computer what to do before leaving the user at the A prompt. For users without a hard disk, the autoexec.bat file can be used to start up specific applications. For example, the Happy Hacker has a wordprocessing disk that will always load a spelling checker program and then start the word processor anytime the computer is reset with the disk in drive...
Users with hard disks might have several useful utility programs, such as print spoolers or spelling checkers, automatically loaded every time they boot up. The Happy Hacker uses his hard disk's autoexec.bat file to perform several functions. After checking a calendar program to see if it's a friend's or relative's birthday, loading in a ramdisk and copying certain files to it, installing a utility which blanks the screen after five minutes of non-use, and finally printing a quote of the day (drawn from a very large database), the Happy Hacker finally has control...
...Happy Hacker, he's too busy waiting for an unprotected copy of flight simulator to worry about operating environments. But at least the word processing is quicker...