---TODAY--- OVERVIEW Have you ever thought it would be nice to know what interesting things happened on a date in history? When famous, or not so famous, birthdays occurred? TODAY will tell you. When the program is run, it looks at the system date, or a date you supply, then tells you what things of interest happened on that date. You can even create a file of dates important to you and be reminded of them right along with the Marquis de Sade's birthday or the first commercial radio broadcast. Just type: TODAY HELP INSTALLATION TODAY is distributed as an archive file(TODAY.ARC) and you must have ARC V5.0 or later to extract the required files. ARC is shareware from System Enhancement Associates and is available on many computer bulletin boards. The files comprising the TODAY system are: TODAY.DOC - This file TODAY.EXE - The program TODAY.MON - where MON is JAN thru DEC. These files contain all the interesting trivia. TODAY.OWN - a sample personal TODAY message file After printing this DOC file, you need not keep it on disk but you will need the EXE and all the MON files. They MUST all be in the same directory on your disk. Why not call it TODAY? To install TODAY from the root directory, with ARC available, do: md \today cd \today arc e today *.* cd \ This will create a directory called today and un-archive the files you need to use the system. To run it from your AUTOEXEC.BAT you would insert these three lines: cd \today today once clear wait (use your choice of options) cd \ This example would change directories to TODAY's directory, run the program only once each day, clearing the screen at the beginning and waiting for a key press at the end before continuing with your BAT file. HOW TO USE THE PROGRAM You can just enter TODAY and get the scoop on the current date or you can optionally enter a date as MMDD, with leading zeros, to see what happened on a particular date. There are several options: MMDD a date, such as 0401, to use instead of the system date HELP will display running instructions CLEAR will clear the screen before displaying anything WAIT will wait for a key press after the display ONCE will only run TODAY once each day. Without this option it will display msgs each time it is run. Used in an AUTOEXEC.BAT, it will only run TODAY when you turn on your system, not when you reboot. Most of these options are useful when TODAY is run from an AUTOEXEC.BAT when you turn on your machine. They cause the program to only run the first time you boot, not when you re-boot. You can clear the screen of previous stuff before today's little gems and you can have a pause at the end so the messages aren't destroyed by subsequent programs. For example: TODAY CLEAR 0628 CUSTOMIZATION TODAY has one data file for each month of the year. They are named TODAY.JAN, .FEB, .MAR etc. You can also have a personal file named TODAY.OWN. This is so all your important dates aren't scattered among 12 files. All files are plain vanilla ASCII in this format: Column 1: The record type which can be a B for birthdays, S for special dates in history or R for a reminder. Cols 2-5: Month and day as MMDD with leading zeros. Zeros for either month or day cause ALL months or days to match when being scanned. For example 0001 would match the first of every month while 0400 would match every day of April. Cols 6-9: The full year of the event as four digits. May be left blank, msg will move left. Column 10: A special processing flag. Values may be: BLANK for no special processing. C to continue a message from the previous line. Note, that you MUST repeat the date fields. DAY-OF-WEEK DIGIT where 1=Sunday ... 7=Saturday This will cause the message to display only if the date falls on a certain day of the week. Look in the November file for voting day examples. Cols 11-70 The message to display for this date. --EXAMPLES-- *mmddyyyy Birthdays *-------- ------------------------------------------------------------ B09011875 Edgar Rice Burroughs, novelist, Ah-ee-ah-ee-ah! B09021838 Queen Liliuokalani (last queen of Hawaii). B09021952 Jimmy Connors, tennis brat *mmddyyyy Events *-------- ------------------------------------------------------------ S09011939 Germany invades Poland, starts World War II. S09011952 Sutro Baths purchased by George Whitney. S0901 2Labor Day, a legal holiday S09021620 The Mayflower sets sail from Plymouth with S09021620C102 Pilgrims. *mmddyyyy Reminders *-------- ------------------------------------------------------------ R0001 Pay the mortgage! R0401 Taxes due in two weeks. R0415 Last day to pay taxes! Leave the headings in or you may get a nasty surprise. Note that Labor day must be on a Monday and the Mayflower gets two lines of coverage befitting that momentous event. This format applies to TODAY.OWN also. You can put in birthdays, anniversaries, holidays etc. Messages in your personal file will tend to be only Birthdays and Reminders. Also, try putting in reminders a few days BEFORE the date in question to give youself some warning. HISTORY TODAY/PC was written in Datalight C for IBM PC compatible systems by Patrick Kincaid in July of 1986. It was inspired by a program originally written by Mike Butler in PL/1 on an IBM VM/CMS system. He should be credited with the original concept and the bulk of the wonderful data in the files. You will notice a distinct San Francisco flavor to the databases. Who says programs can't have class? USER SUPPORT Don't send money, send more dates! I would like the program distributed far and wide for free with this understanding: if you like it send me more dates to put in the databases. This way we can create real shareware. Don't send the month files with your new dates added, send the new stuff as listings, in standalone files on PC diskettes or as electronic mail to me via the Marin-Sonoma PC User Group BBS (415) 927-1216. You can mail listings, bugs (features!) or suggestions to: Patrick Kincaid 618 Douglas Drive Mill Valley, CA 94941 And remember... We call it software because we cannot keep it up.