WinDoze & PC Clones

WinDoze & PC Clones

last update 12/09/03
This page is no longer maintained very actively. Periodically I remove dead links. What's still here are links I discovered over the years, and some programming information. One of my hobbies is figuring out the internal file formats used by various programs and I periodically add new information here. There are a ton of link lists to Windows Utilities, but much less on WIN operating system internals seems to make it to the public domain. I am coming to the conclusion that Microsoft intentionally keeps changing things to augment their revenue stream. I guess that's ok, but it pushes me toward Linux and real open source.

Useful Windows Utilities


As a personal note I have to add that I have a lot of respect for R. Rimmer the author of the Alchemy Mindworkshop software. Its a good shareware product. However I had a very unpleasant overbilling experience with the personel who handle his paper work when I registered my version. Be careful.

Windows Information and Source Code

The Big Guys you Undoubtably know about

Or Some Others you may have Missed

File formats and System Standards

This has always been of interest to me, Wotsit below is good place to start, but I'm not sure how current it is now. It has ignored my most recent submissions, and seems to have a lot of popup adds (sigh). Mostly this is a collection of my explorations, although valid, some are for REALLY old programs!

Then there is my old friend MS DOS

All you hot shots out there may be sneering but if you had as many XT machines lying around as I do you'd want to do something with them. DOS is "mature" enough that there is now a lot of freely available software. There are even Free-DOS and Open DR-DOS projects. If you can live without a graphical interface (and some of us even like that!), there is nothing wrong with pre-586 machine for email, ftp, and news group access. After all these were some of the things the Internet was intended for, ie passing information around, its just not as showy. DOS machines also work quite nicely as a node on a TCP IP ethernet using Linux as the server, although if you've gotten to here you probably have a better system anyway. Linux is what I'd recommend for networking but I'm not ready to give up on DOS and if interested check out the links below:

If you know anyone who wants to get an old PC without enough memory to run WITHOUT Windows connected to the internet, check out packet driver solutions. The crynwr.com driver collection is freely avaiable, and from this page you will find a link to a list of free packet driver compliant applications which will run in DOS. My personal favorite was the NCSA telnet program.
Or if you'd like a universal DOS decoding program for UUENCODE,XXENCODE,MPACK(mime),SHIP and BINHEX (Mac+Intel) files. try udec1_1.zip This is freeware, there also a shareware version 1.2 available at this site.