C

The next product that I wrote was a simple command-line screen capture utility called ScreenKap. It was written in C. It used the same graphics library that I had purchased for WallShow and WallMake. ScreenKap existed in two forms; a console mode application and a Windows UI application. The UI application didn’t really have a user interface … it just didn’t bring up a dark console window while trying to capture the screen contents.

For some personal needs, I built a C program that would act as kind of an installer tool. I embedded some files to the executable. When run, the executable would extract the files and it would invoke a specific one as a batch file. I formalized the code a bit yielding a new utility: CMD2EXE. CMD2EXE was based on a simple C runtime stub. When executed, the stub would check for files that had been appended to it.

I had been spending some time in the Usenet groups comp.os.msdos.batch and comp.os.msdos.batch.nt. Those were fun groups. Participants in those groups were usually talking about writing batch files to perform various kinds of tasks. The people that frequented these groups were usually MS-DOS/Windows systems administrators. They were a target audience for the tools I had built so far. I had noticed how complex some of the tasks some of them needed to write and maintain were.

My MailSend customers would often ask me about programs that could supplement MailSend. Some asked for schedulers, some asked about controlling dialup networking back when many ISP’s charged by the minute for time on the Internet. I sat down one morning and wrote two utilities: HangUp and TSched. HangUp HangUp was just a program that would hang up the first dialup connection using the RAS ( Remote Access Services ) API.