NukeSoft

What’s NukeSoft about? I’ve been using the name for years. It originally came about in the mid-90s when I was first getting into serious programming and doing a GCSE in computer studies. My GCSE project included a basic database system written in QBasic. Rather than just using my own name in the copyright notice, I used the name Soft Warehouse. Then I discovered a company called Software Warehouse (who eventually became Jungle.com and were ultimately bought out by Argos in the 2000 dotcom crash) so I promptly had to come up with something else. I don’t think they’d have cared about a teenager using a similar name for personal programming projects, but better safe than sorry. I adapted a name from a mountain bike equipment company and eventually came up with NukeSoft. Nearly 20 years on I still have the name but I’m tending towards using houlden.org instead. If you do have an email address like SexyBitch@example.com or IRoolzDaWorld@example.com, it’s good to have an alternative that you can share with possible future employers and such like without looking like a teenager who’s just got online for the first time.

In 2000 I registered the domain nukesoft.co.uk and had the idea of setting up a reasonably comprehensive DOS reference, up to and including most of the commands in Windows 95. I’m working on getting that content migrated over to WordPress on this site, but it’s more for historical interest now. The last version of standalone MS-DOS was 6.22 and was released in 1994. There are projects like FreeDOS that offer a lot of the same features, but Microsoft MS-DOS is no longer supported or maintained. To run DOS apps on current versions of Windows there’s DOSbox, Microsoft Virtual PC or Oracle Virtualbox, but you may need a DOS (FreeDOS maybe?) install to get them to run.

I also wrote a set of utilities called the NukeSoft Utilities which were basic command line tools to do calculations and a few other things, but I lost the source code ages ago and a lot of the functionality is now handled by the Windows Powershell or cmd.exe. On the off chance people still have them, I wouldn’t use them any more.