What a marvelous response, Bob.
Thank you.
As must be obvious, I'm frightfully out of touch. I have one machine (at home) that I boot from a floppy once a week so I can do certain things I've done for years. I used to have System Commander on that machine so I could boot into DOS or Windows, as I wished. That wonderful state of affairs came to a painful close when I asked my friendly hardware guru to add memory to my system and he decided to bring me fully up to date by reformatting my hard drive to FAT-32 (or whatever). Some of the critical parts of that system were unrecoverable.
Fortunately, I had most of them on my system in the office, as well, so I only lost one arm and one leg. Needless to say, I still have System Commander on the machine in the office.
Consider me cantankerous if you wish, but I prize stability in my systems above all else, and DOS gives me that. My current anxiety stems from the fact that I'm training one of my daughters to replace me ... and she's a modern chick! I'm guess I'm gonna hafta unhitch the team and let myself be dragged, kicking and screaming, out of the 19th century.
MicroSoft made such a "thing" about getting rid of DOS that I was sure they'd finally accomplished it with XP. I know that, on the Win98 machine at the house, the DOS mode is crippled so I'm forced to boot from a floppy to do things the way I want to do them.
Thanks for the pointer on CSCRIPT. I'd never even heard of it. I'll try that today, and start getting on with my life. As you suggest, though, PERL sounds like a wonderful idea. I'm quite sure I can get some training in it around this area. After all, I used to edit the ACGNJ (Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey) newsletter in the late 70's/early 80's. Some of the young bucks from those days are probably still around, albeit white-haired. Since there is hard copy guidance, that's the place for me to start. I love words (I take them to bed every night ... where they put me to sleep).
Fred
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
