cobol5/quickmenu

A DOS menuing system.

On October 26th, 2018 I purchased the software assets of Full Moon Software. Full Moon Software used to be known as Crescent Software. They produced a line of excellent development libraries for MS-DOS. The supported environments were QuickBASIC 4.x, Microsoft Professional Development System v7.x, and Visual Basic for DOS.

The idea behind obtaining these products was to release them to the public domain to ensure that people could still access these things in the future. While most developers will have no use for these products in a modern develoment environment, they still have value as an example of "how it was done" back in the heyday of x86 DOS development.

The software in this repository hasn't been modified from how I received it from Ethan Winer, the original author. While all the source files carry some kind of Copyright notice, the software is now in the public domain.

The original distribution disk files and documentation are available here:

http://annex.retroarchive.org/crescent/index.html

Gene Buckle, October 27th, 2018

About Crescent Software: After 20 years as a professional recording engineer and musician, Ethan Winer founded Crescent Software in 1986, quickly building it to become the leading provider of add-on products for use with Microsoft compiled BASIC for DOS. During that time Ethan wrote numerous articles about DOS BASIC and assembly language for all of the major programming magazines, and also served as a contributing editor for PC Magazine. Ethan also received Microsoft's MVP award every year since 1996 for his assistance in the Microsoft BASIC programming newsgroups. In 1992 Ethan sold Crescent to his partner Don Malin, and retired in order to pursue his musical interests.

Here's the Quick Menu description from the manual:

QuickMenu is designed to simplify and speed up the process required by DOS to access programs, DOS commands and other utilities. It is recommended for users who have hard disks and several applications programs that they use at least occasionally. QuickMenu provides the operator with a menu (or several menus, as necessary) from which to select these programs.

This eliminates the need to remember which subdirectory each program resides in and its DOS file name. With minimal knowledge about running programs, an inexperienced user can set up a system that is appropriate for his or her own needs.