Hi there,
On Fri, 3 Apr 2026, Eric Auer via Freedos-user wrote:
Are you saying that Super-PCKWIK has a year 2000 bug?
No, I'm not saying that - I suspect the problem is with the amount of
RAM in the system. I had to take Super-PCKWIK out of service at the
beginning of 2000 because it stopped working but I don't *know* why.
If it were a Y2K problem I'd probably have made my notes in the first
few days of January 2000. As it is, they were made on January 14th.
My current notebook only goes back as far as early July 2000 - I kid
you not - and my previous notebook is in storage. My memory of over
quarter a century ago is hazy. I do vaguely recollect that I had some
problems with just one of several versions (from V3.x to V6.x) of the
package which I've used, but that these were fixed fairly promptly by
the supplier with a later version. All the versions were bought IIRC
by mail order (either directly from PC-KWIK Corporation in the USA or
through one of their distributors here in the UK) whenever there was a
new user for my sales office software.
https://archive.org/details/superpckwikdiskaccelerator111
says it would be a disk cache, does it also buffer print data?
Yes. I bought it specifically for the print spooler at about the time
that the sales office software was starting to see serious use. Some
users were printing listings with hundreds of thousands of products on
dot-matrix printers, which could impact other uses of the (multi-user)
system unacceptably. A two hour print job could be sent to the print
spooler in a couple of minutes. (Yes, multi-user. Yes, MS-DOS. :)
PS: Version 1.11 of 1986 might not be the right version, I guess.
AFAICR I've never had a copy of V1.x. After a quick search I came
across an image which I recognized from the printed manuals here:
https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/ad9fb578-8fdd-11eb-bc5b-0200008a0da4
although I'm not sure that I ever saw a version 5.x of Super PC-KWIK.
My backups tell me that the first version I used was 3.1 from 1993:
8<----------------------------------------------------------------------
READ.ME
PC-Kwik(R) Power Pak
Version 3.1
Copyright 1986-1993 PC-Kwik Corporation
To install PC-Kwik Power Pak on your hard disk, place the distribution
diskette in drive A and enter the following commands:
...
8<----------------------------------------------------------------------
I have a version which I've backed up under '6_04' which claims in at
least one of its docs to be 6.03 so I guess things went a little awry
with the docs (or maybe with the version numbering) in the mid-1990s:
8<----------------------------------------------------------------------
$ acat pck6/pck6_04/disc3.zip READ.ME | head
READ.ME
PC-Kwik(R) Power Pak for Windows
DOS Install for PC-Kwik Super PC-Kwik Version 6.03
Copyright 1986-1994 PC-Kwik Corporation
These instructions are for non-Windows users who wish to install Super PC-Kwik.
...
8<----------------------------------------------------------------------
I didn't need caching for mass storage, as far as I was concerned the
caching provided by MS-DOS was always satisfactory. I still use the
venerable smartdrv.exe:
8<----------------------------------------------------------------------
$ ls --full-time smartdrv.exe ; md5sum smartdrv.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ged ged 45145 1994-05-31 06:22:00.000000000 +0100 smartdrv.exe
25ba5ecadb1dc43ea40920a6ba925352 smartdrv.exe
$
8<----------------------------------------------------------------------
Obviously the cut-n-pastes are from backups on Linux boxes. ;)
HTH
--
73,
Ged.
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