A year later I'm still looking for it, so this is just a bump hoping that someone will eventually recognize it. How unfortunate, having so fond memories for something you considered back then to be almost standard practice, only to find out a lot of years later it was only a "neighborhood" thing 😀

i have something similiar, ill post a screenshot tonight when i get home from work! i never found anyone else useing it. mine came from a coverdisk from the uk or something.

i'll probably dig every zip i have. I recall seeing something like this on a little 1994 catalog booklet of some sort (which featured a screensaver of Bill Gates doing windows) probably not the same though

Wow guys, please do. It's the first time ever I get some reaction to this rough sketch. Coverdisk and 1994 sound really promising, apparently it is as unknown as something only published in a coverdisk and the year is really close to what I remember. You have no idea how many BBS archives I've downloaded from FTPs and browsed until now...

this is? I've had + use this for years and years 😀

Its like 1kb; so I threw it on my site

http://mega-tokyo.com/n.com

^I really like that
Thanks 😀

BloodyCactus wrote:

this is? I've had + use this for years and years 😀

Its like 1kb; so I threw it on my site

http://mega-tokyo.com/n.com

Yes, yes and YES!!!!!!!!! I have no words to thank you enough, I've been searching it for unimaginable time!
It looks like my memory served me pretty well on the drawing 😀

I'm going to run it a million times now just to see it again and cry
THANK YOU!

I always thought that the "n.com" was a renamed file for shorter typing (we were using it as a cls), but even though I did search for it, nothing came up. The filename wasn't helping.

no worries 😉 Once I saw your drawing I knew exactly what it was, its pretty distinct. yes I too used it as a 'cls' type tool.

Its copyright is "UK, 1990, Philema Perspectives", and I've only ever known it as "n.com", it came from a business type UK magazine coverdisk. beyond that, nothing else I remember.

Cool. A nice utility.

The program is packed with an unusual method that seems to be named "VACUUM", though it hardly needs packing given the small size. I wonder if the packing was applied originally by the developer or later by someone else, and if the packing program was ever released.

as author of said packer. its called vacuum, its written in pmode asm as an exercise using dos32 extender (adam seychell version), yes it was released.

i cant check at work but I think this is it; its on stuba.sk

ftp://ftp.elf.stuba.sk/pub/pc/pack/vacuum.zip

I never wrote an unpacker since its .com, its not needed imo, its so simple.

it works, but it was an test really, not very comparable to other packers, not worth using imo! 😀 I wrote unpackers for lots of things, worked on a cpu emulator for a universal unpacker too (avoids needing int1 tricks etc).

So let me get this straight: not only you had this completely unknown utility, but someone used your packer on it? What are the odds, are you sure you didn't write n.com as well? 🤣

btw I'm almost sure that the n.com file I had was 8-9KBs (yes, I had it as n.com too but I didn't mention it in the first post because I thought it was renamed since there was no search result whatsoever about that filename). Can its current size be the result of said packer? If so (and since an unpacker was never available) someone other that the author did it.

edit: on second thought, maybe you run your packer on it, at some long forgotten moment!

Here is the unpacked program. I also removed a piece of appended code that causes the program's display to be messed up if the default drive is A:, at least in DOSBox. There is also a string of four NOP instructions in the program that appears to be another modification, but not easy to guess what might have been there. Note that the unpacked program has a notice intended to be shown when the file is displayed with the TYPE command.

Perhaps not worth noting since it seems fixed in SVN R3972, but there is a problem with it in stock 0.74.

Which works in SVN R3972:

interesting little util, not bad 😁
Tried it on my XT setup, it does take a while (as expected) to calculate the free space when you run it after a boot , same as the DIR command. Run N.COM once and you get this screen - nothing unusual (no battery atm so date/clock is not working properly)

Run it a second time and the prompt is no longer white:

you have to CLS to restore the color and have N.COM work OK once more for one single instance, then the color gets stuck again upon exit. Nothing big, sure , just mentioning it... 😀

For puristnesses here's N.ARJ........renamed to a ZIP so this board can take it (it's still an ARJ)

@keropi: the program uses an ANSI code to clear the screen, so the ANSI driver you have loaded (or don't have loaded) can make a difference.

^ no ansi driver loaded at all ... nothing is getting loaded on boot tbh in this setup, at least it works OK one time so it's something 🤣
At any rate, it's a little annoying for a XT setup to be forced to wait each time for the free space calculation , I'll probably won't care about this util since I wasn't using it back then (or anything similar for that matter but I do understand completely konc's nostalgia reasons though, glad this was unearthed 😊 )

keropi wrote:

^ no ansi driver loaded at all ... nothing is getting loaded on boot tbh in this setup 🤣 , at least it works OK one time so it's something 🤣

You are correct, this is exactly the behavior.
-Without (DOS's) ANSI.SYS loaded: second time you run it you get the viagra look.
-With (DOS's) ANSI.SYS loaded: sorry, no viagra for you. No matter how many times you run it, prompt stays gray.

(wow again, this does pull strings. I can't describe how happy I am people are actually interested in this, trying it, unpacking it, typing it, posting the unpacked file...)