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DirectConsole's History
When I started writing DirectConsole, I barely knew anything about writing Windows programs. I already knew how to access the file system using the Common Runtime library routines, so that's what I began using to build an application that would look and feel like the command prompt. DirectConsole started out using DirectDraw for drawing the prompt. I hadn't learned how to use GDI yet! By the end of my junior year in high school, I had switched the project over to GDI, and progress was speeding up. I spent the entire summer working on DirectConsole and learning about Windows programming. By the end of summer, DirectConsole could connect to FTP resources and map them to virtual drives. Everything inside DirectConsole was virtual. Physical drives could be mapped and unmapped to the virtual drive letters in the program. FTP, and eventually POP3, resources could be handled just like physical drives. When my senior year began, I was feeling pretty proud of DirectConsole, and I decided to get some feedback by sharing it with some of the other students. The response was very positive. However, there was a sweeping paranoia all around the Aberdeen school district at the time about how to run the computers. No one could access the DOS prompt. No one could access the registry editor. There were other restrictions as well. You can imagine how heads began to turn as students, all of a sudden, were able to open up a command prompt window, type commands, or even open up a registry editing utility and click away all of the restrictions! DirectConsole was written as a tool, and as all tools go, how they are used is up to the user. DirectConsole never was used for malice, but the high school administration feared DirectConsole like the plague! I was called down to the office numerous times during my senior year, as were other students, so the administration could try to stop DirectConsole. They never seemed to realize there was nothing to stop, so they only ended up just wasting everyone's time. In the end, I was banned from the library, and that pretty much summarizes my senior year at Aberdeen High School. I guess we may as well blame DirectConsole for Aberdeen High School burning down in 2002! And yes, the building in the picture was the building with the library from which I was banned. This is a much more satisfying way to summarize DirectConsole's legacy! After high school, DirectConsole began to fade. Everyone who saw DirectConsole in college was impressed, and I even began a rewrite of DirectConsole, DirectConsole 2000. In a way, DirectConsole was just as much an experience as it was an application, and it was a big application! I had some big plans for DirectConsole, but after a while, I lost interest and started working on other projects. Once I began writing the E-Mail server in 2001, I stayed focused on it. Now that the E-Mail server has matured, I've begun looking into a new rewrite of DirectConsole. The original was very buggy, and the code was horribly structured. I have always felt that if I were to rewrite the program again, I could avoid all the pitfalls I encountered the first two times and come out with a really useful tool. And that's DirectConsole is really all about - it's a tool that lets you access resources and automate tasks with complex scripts and plug-ins.
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