A Word From JCC

John C Cattelin speaks out on his partner pulling off the unbelievable.

Get It Try It

I wrote the original boilerplate for X-file several years ago. I'd never been a fan of the TV series with almost the same name, but I did think the name was catchy and 'cool': a bit of typical Redmond simplicity but also the flavour of something better - the 'X' being immediately reminiscent of UNIX.

The original X-file did little more than put all the pieces in place, initialize and exit. Also, its supposition was that menu and toolbar commands would be laid out almost exactly like Winfile, something which later proved impractical. It did list all accessible drives, but no files, nor did it try any file operations. Yet it did run. But as NT users had a viable and trusty workhorse in NT's File Manager, there seemed little point in pursuing the project. At the end of the day it was only an afternoon daydream. The deck got dusty.

I got a call from Rick in the fall of 1998. He was down in the south of England for a week and had taken along one of our Win2K betas (which we'd happily never used). It was the perfect opportunity to test the garbage on a machine that was going to be wiped clean at the end of the week anyway.

Win2K was screwing around with our friend Winfile. A closer look revealed the only reason it ran at all was Rick already had it on disk - it was not part of the Win2K distribution. Drag-drop did not work properly and application settings did not 'stick'. This news smelled deliberate sabotage even where I was, a thousand miles away.

Rick implied that we needed to get cracking for our own sakes. I did not have the time for such a monstrous enterprise and suspected he did not either. In retrospect it is fairly obvious that none of us are ever going to run Win2K anyway, but the point has been made: mainstream commercial PC software truly stinks; this application proves that it does not have to be so.

The thought that one can have a file manager under fifteen kilobytes on disk is nothing short of staggering. I am told that uncompressed it is still only 24KB so this is still pretty amazing. It also beats Mark Ward's 'magic line' by 2,048 bytes and today is a far better - and much sexier - app than when first introduced on RISKS last Christmas.

PC software is getting better - slowly - as PC users grow up and fill in the gaps left deliberately behind by the manipulators in Redmond. This program will put them on the spot as never before.

Cat