4Dos

Ah the good old days of Fidonet. I remember spending a lot of time with the local sysops reading stuff and wanting to be that cool to have my own BBS and the network feeds that it entailed. I really think that was why I was so thrilled the first time I dialed into the Internet with a 14,400 baud modem. It was total information gluttony. Granted the 90/10 rule hadn't set in yet as much so there was a lot of *easy to find* information that I could read.

And there was 4dos on the BBS's.

4dos was a godsend. It let me do command historys and paint my prompt and all sorts of things that I do now in bash shell. It was the defacto shell I used on my old Gateway. It had everything, aliases being the nicest part of it. Man now a days I recommend people use cygwin, but 4dos will always have a place in my heart telling me not to settle for crappy shells.

Computer Loving

So got a new motherboard and some new memory. The computer was still not working. However the wife, bless her soul, mentioned that maybe I should try the old memory in the new mobo. Sure enough, it booted and stayed stable. Yay. Now I can surf again.

Oh and she got me a dvd+-r/w Sony DR710UL external. The successor to the one I have at work. And it's a sweet piece of hardware. The Nero stuff isn't that bad either, but then again I didn't really get a choice in burning software and the native stuff for Windows XP tried to think that the drive was a CD writer. The only weird thing now is that one of the cdrw drives in the machine (of which there are two) wouldn't detect or show in the items known category till I did an 'Add Software'. Very odd.