CFOG's PIP, August 1989, Volume 8 No. 3, Whole No. 71, page 23

A Review of 4DOS

by Bill Loftin

[You'll see elsewhere in this issue some comments by Charlie Kestner about 4DOS. Here's a short review that appeared in the June '89 issue of Bug Bytes, newsletter of the Central Maryland Micro Users' Group. -- bhc]

4DOS is another "DOS shell", i.e., a program that gives you access to DOS commands and functions. Unlike most shells which try to isolate the novice user from the MS-DOS command line, 4DOS gets you deeper into 'DOS. It enriches and simplifies ihe environment making the user more productive. 4DOS replaces the MS-DOS or PC-DOS command interpreter COMMAND.COM for all versions of DOS 2.x and above and maintains compatibility. flexibility, and control.

There is a small consideration to achieve 2.x compatibility. 4DOS will run on any PC with DOS and will determine which processor (8086 through 80386) it is hosted on and optimize accordingly. It can remain resident in memory (uses 55K bytes vs. my 35K with COMMAND.COM and ANSI.COM) or can swap out (to EMS, VDISK, or fixed disk) and leave only 5K in memory.

4DOS has more than sixty internal commands. Twelve of these are existing DOS internal commands. There are 20 enhanced DOS commands and 35 all new commands. There is online help of several diffenent kinds and several different levels of help detail. There is command line editing (throw away CED), multiple commands on a single line, expanded command line length, flexible file wildcards (more so than pd), file descriptions, environment variables, aliases, command history, and many new batch-file commands.

If you use LIST, junk it and use the internal LIST command. MEMORYMAP and KEY-FAKE are also internal commands. The ALIAS and KEYSTACK commands provide you power you never thought DOS could offer.

I encountered 4DOS as shareware [it is on CFOG's Antelope Freeway Remote Access System and by the September meeting Steve Lucius will be sure to have included it in our MS-DOS disk library, I'm sure. -- bhc] and I liked enough to register immediately. The software was written by Rex Conn and is distributed by J.P. Software, P.O. Box 1470, East Arlington, MA 02174, [617] 646-3975. Registration is $50.00.

If you think this review is a commercial for 4DOS, it is in a way because of my experiences with the company. I wanted to swap to VDISK and that option had not been implemented. Two days after I called J.P. Software I had a new floppy with VDISK swapping. On several occasions when I had some incompatibilities I called, and they responded with changes, never saying it was the fault of my software. Their attitude toward the customer is unlike any other company I have dealt with.

I think that they have stopped delivering their special version of ANSI.SYS as that was the source of most of their problems of compatibility. They distribute the latest version of TSRCOM.ARC (2.6) because of incompatibilities in older versions of MARK and RELEASE from TurboPower Software.

The setup instructions are well written and I would recommend that you choose the manual installation to get to know your software a little better.