winready
1.0.0
WinReady – File Compressor Manager
Luis Leonardo Nuñez Ibarra. Year 1996. email: [email protected].
Chilean, married, I have 2 children. Video game and table tennis fan. My first computer was a Talent MSX that my dad bought me back in 1985. On it I took my first steps playing games like Galaga and PacMan and then programming in MSX-BASIC.
Currently my area of knowledge is related to .NET technologies with more than 15 years of experience developing various web pages using ASP.NET and SQL Server and Oracle databases. Technology integrator, service development, desktop applications.
WinReady is a multi-manager file compressor for MSDOS. Initially written in Visual Basic 3 when I was a student.
Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you will feed him for the rest of his life (Chinese Proverb)
I was in, I think, my last year of high school and my mother, with a lot of effort, bought me a 386 SLC computer with 33 MHZ and 4 MB of ram. It belonged to the nephew or son of a co-worker. This person was studying at USACH at that time. Talking a little, we agreed that we were both computer scientists.
After that and talking about languages, I asked myself if I knew Visual Basic. I had not heard him so he told me a little about what the language was about and gave me advice that to this day I have to be grateful for. He told me that Clipper, which in those years was the king of DOS application languages, was going to die and that everything was going to go to Windows. He gave me a box of VB3 floppy disks (I think there were about 9 disks) and recommended that I go buy a manual or guide to the language behind the university.
Well, I went and bought a photocopied book from that time and started with the exercises from it. That's how I started my first programs and then learning more and more. Since I liked it and had many of my backups at that time on floppy disks compressed mainly with arj.exe and rar.exe, I decided to make my own graphical compressor manager in Visual Basic 3.
I remember that I learned a lot to do things with file management and communicate with the operating system, which at that time was MS DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11.
I missed classes many times in my enthusiasm for my project, I must admit. I became passionate about it and ended up naming it WinReady, which was my first personal project that I am very fond of.
Today, in the 21st century and after 24 years of writing it, I want to share it with you so that you can study it, who knows how to improve it and learn from it just as I learned.
Since this project was originally written in VB3, it uses VBX files (the predecessors of the ActiveX libraries), but it can still be loaded in VB6 today.
If you do not have the VBX components that the project occupies, you can download them from the Internet and then copy them to the SYSTEM directory in Windows.
The project was developed using the visual basic file components, communicating with the operating system through .BAT files and using the ARJ and RAR compressor command options. Later I incorporated other compressors of the time such as PKZIP, LHA, PAK.
I also developed a .HLP help file with which I learned at that time and self-taught how to generate application documentation in .HLP files.
During those years my intention was to sell it as shareware and earn a few pesos with it, but even if I didn't succeed, I learned a lot from it.
I hope that this project that was born from a personal need will be used for study and motivation purposes.
