Tricycles of Love - Programming

From Bowery to Broome to Greene

SDir - Hard Disk File Manager

In Its Own Little World...

It romped and stomped, it stalked this earth, throwing back its head and howling, barking in the face of other file utilities, programs that, by comparison, were mere directory listers: the cute and cleverly-named but ultimately baffling 1Dir; PC Magazine's fairly zippy and extremely free but strangely compartmentalized DR and RN; and Brown Bag's dippy Power Menu. They all cowered in shame and fear when confronted with the majesty that was SDir.

SDir was hipper than hip, hotter than hot; it'd tear through yer hard drive and list every single file on that sucker faster than, well, faster than anything but the previous version. Where the heck's that file? Fire up SDir and do up a search -- search names, search through the flipping contents, search for any old piece of anything that you could remember. And it'd find em and mark em so you could take a gander and see which files were the ones you were hunting for.

The gandering was the part that had never been done before. SDir would show you the contents of text files of course (even weirdo EBCDIC suckers from IBM's brain-dead DisplayWrite), but the ace up its sleeve, the totally rad feature, was how it'd announce, "I think it goes something like this," turn its back to you for a moment, then slowly turn back around and do a frighteningly good impression of Lotus 1-2-3. There on the screen, stripped of the normally impenetrable binary goopy that was and is the WKS format, shone the heart of your spreadsheet. Columns A, B & C... Rows 1, 2, & 3... all the way out to IV-land if need be. Quite the handy little feature not to have to retrieve each file on your hard disk one by one in order to find that dimly-remembered worksheet you'd up worked up a year or so ago.

Once you had your mitts on whatever file or files you wanted, you could delete em, rename em, copy them, move them, hide them, dice them, slice them, churn them into a dessert topping, it was your call, and couldn't have been easier [well, maybe].

I "wrote" SDir, but really, it was stolen. Stolen first, in its earliest and simplest incarnation, from a mainframe, um, environment(?) called SPF, and then later stolen BIGTIME from the brains of two of the brightest sparks on this planet: Steve Herrmann and Linda Plevrites. They'd come in and say, what if it did such-and-such? Can you make it do so-and-so? And then they'd go away and let me close the door and work on it for a couple of days... Not only that, but it was stolen from as many other brains as Steve and Linda could proselytyze the thing to as well. Fun fun fun. They couldn't have made it easier, or more gratifying. Thanks, Steve and Linda: you were and are the best.

We all worked on it together in our, ahem, spare time over the course of two or three years (at least!).

And then, one day, flippin XTree came along and my heart sank. Fast? This thing was at least twice as fast, and SDir had already been tweaked to the point where there was nothing that was gonna make it do the tricks that XTree did. Plus, XTree could handle huge numbers of directories and files, as much as available memory (conventional, expanded, extended, it seemed to use anything) would allow. I was stumped, and slightly sickened.

I'd run up hard against some inherent limits of Turbo Pascal, and some limits imposed by early design decisions, so the only thing to do was to rewrite it, perhaps in a faster language, perhaps in C. And so I did.

But the results were bigger and slower and BUGGY in a way that SDir had never been (tho Steve and Linda had certainly found their share of bugs in the original). SDir in C just kinda blew, so I threw it away. From time to time I'd have a brainstorm about how to tweak just an eensy bit more performance or capacity out of SDir, but really, it was done for...

SORT OF done for...

I still use it, Steve still uses it, Shatz, Christine, Tommy, Hank, George and Shoes 'n Slacks and probably even Kollman, for Xrist's sake -- a whole heck of a lot of people managed to get their minds poisoned by SDir, and they all still swear by it. God help them.

So here it is, SDir 2.62... Grab it and have a look. Snicker at the 2,500 file limit. Once upon a time that was an outrageously big number.

And hey, maybe one of these days I'll figure out a way to multiply it by 10, or a hundred, or whatever ya need. And all those files will *POP* on your screen instantaneously, just the way we always wanted them to, just the way we knew they could...

Land of dances
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This page modified on August 6, 1995