F6K'S DOS JOURNAL, MORNING ERRANDS September 14, 2026 For me, Monday are generally days off. You can easily imagine how much I look forward to them. For today, I decided to put myself to a special task: DOS programs chasing. And since I learned this is quite time consuming, I needed to have few hours just by myself. So, after dropping the Little One to school, I went back home, settled confortably at the computer, put some bluegrass music on the radio, and set out to roam the wild Interconnected Network for the morning. My idea, as always, is to find interesting programs for my 4 year old son, mainly educational ones. I have already said this in the journal, but there are many applications of this type that were developed in the 1980s and 1990s for the DOS. But what surprises me most, I think, is seeing from where these applications come from. Obviously, some are made and/or published by well-known large companies - like Interplay, Sierra On-Line, or the French Cocktel Vision. But when you look beyond the headlines, you also find plenty of small applications created by individuals and small businesses working on their own. While these programs may generally be less polished in terms of design and presentation, they nonetheless offer significant educational value. Even, apparently, some individuals started little business to provide children good edutainment software, like the French Les Editions Chrysis. Based in Poitiers, France, they started in 1988 and decided to develop software tailored to classrooms, rather than for the general public. Actually I think they were selling only to schools. I've found online something called "Mes premiers logiciels" ("My first software" in english) which is a small collection of 4 programs. They are very simple, so much that some of them look like a proof of concept, if anything else. They can be compared to ones of the small programs found in Paul Blair's FUZOMA - namely FROG.COM, TRUCK.COM, etc. - which seems to have been created partly to demonstrate what is possible to do with the XPL0 interpreter. Returning to Les Editions Chrysis, I managed to find a list in the database of the Bibliotheque nationale de France (French national library) of the titles they offered until 2004. It is covering everything from primary school to high school. Unfortunately I haven't (yet?) managed to get my hands on any titles other than "Mes premier logiciels". Maybe next time? Oh, while I'm thinking about it, I should ask my son's school. I spotted a dusty projector with pre-2000 educational slides in a box on an old, neglected piece of furniture. Who knows, they might even have some old floppy disks and CDs lying around... An other thing I learned this morning, but on the matter of how I need to do those "errands": I shouldn't let opportunities slip by. What I mean is that, at first, I would see interesting things that weren't quite right for my son's level yet, and I'd tell myself, "I'll come back here and get them when the time is right." But, really? Will I? I shouldn't kid myself: chances are that 1) I'll forget about those programs, and 2) even if I remember their name and where to find them, there's no guarantee I'll be able to put my hands on them again. So, I started gathering everything that might be useful down the line. I won't be able to test them all - well not today at least, even not tomorrow, and for the sake of it, nor anytime soon while I think of it - but the idea is simply to build up an archive on my server that I can dip into when the time comes. Even I think this archive could be maintained on the flash drive where DOS resides; even in the backup partition, why not? All gathered this morning is 121Mo including compressed manuals in PDF. However, I will need very soon to keep notes - at least brief ones - on these programs. Perhaps in a 00INDEX.TXT file, like in the Simtel.Net archives? Moreover, this file would serve, as well, as a basis for making all this available via FTP one day. As always, it starts with a small task and ends up with even more work to do!