Many years ago, the late lamented QLink asked me to set up a "Special Edition" download area, which I'd update with several files each month.

QLink is gone, but the programs are still around and workable. My objective was to furnish a wide spectrum of programs: some tiny, some large; some amusement, some useful; some games, some technical .. and so on. Not all programs were mine; when I found a good public domain program from somebody else, I'd include it.

Quite a few programs are intended to run on virtually all Commodore 8-bit machines, including the ancient PET and CBM models. They are written in plain vanilla Basic so as to allow this; and the "load address" is set in a way to be compatible with the classic machines. This means that you must use a command such as LOAD "EXPLORE",8 .. do NOT use a following .. ,1.

I write programs in two different styles. One style is tutorial: I want people to read the code and hopefully copy it into their own programs. Examples of this tutorial style include: "PRINT USING", which shows my recommended code for arranging numbers in columns; and "STRING THING", a method to help read data from "difficult" files which might contain awkward characters such as commas or colons.

The other style is "strongly packed". Such a program may not be easy to read, since I've jammed the code together so as to make it small and efficient. You're still welcome to try reading it, of course; but my objective usually was to keep as much RAM available for the job at hand so as to have greater data capacity. Examples of such programs are: UNICOPY, which copies files using a single disk drive by reading them into RAM and then writing them out later; CROSS REF, which scans a Basic program and builds tables of data about that program. You can probably see why I want to conserve working memory for such programs.

Some programs are fun. Some programs are useful. And some are "techie" in nature; you might have to be a programmer and understand some data processing concepts to use these. One example of such an advanced program is "FILESORT64". To use it, you must understand how a data file contains "records", each of which is organized into "fields". The data file must be organized in the most typical way for Commodore 8-bit machines: each field on a separate line. (There's a reason why this is the most popular way to organize data, but the full story would sidetrack us right now). So: even though I modestly think FILESORT is a pretty good program, only a few people will know how to make use of it.

Some of the programs have been written since QLink folded; and I'll likely send along a few extras from time to time.