Category : Display Utilities
Archive   : NOYB.ZIP
Filename : NOYB.DOC
a quick and convinent method for clearing a screen. Two situations
continue to arise:
1). I have confidential information displayed on the screen when
someone not privy to that information enters my office.
2). I am in the midst of an application when I must suddenly leave
the office for a short period of time. This situation was the
real reason I wrote the utility.
NOYB is a resident utility which replaces the current keyboard
interrupt routine. If the
NOYB will save the caller's video environment, clear the screen and turn
off the cursor. In this version of NOYB, the toggle key is the letter
'Z' key. If you own a macro assembler, you can (and should) change the
the toggle key to something different. NOYB 'blanks' the screen in a
safe manner. It simply writes all spaces to the screen using the
standard attributes of background = black, and foreground = white. No
tricks with the video signal are used. The screen is written directly
to video memory (for the purpose of speed) and makes no attempt to pre-
vent the 'snow effect' on CGA cards in text modes. The idea was to
clear the screen quickly, not cosmetically. The purpose of turning off
the cursor was to give the PC the appearance of not being turned on, to
anyone looking into my office from the hall.
NOYB, when toggled, will only operate in 80 column text modes. NOYB
checks the video mode each time it is toggled. If the caller is not in
a text mode, when NOYB is requested, the request is ignored. NOYB also
checks for recursion (i.e. if NOYB is currently active, pressing
and the toggle key again will produce an ignored request).
NOYB, when active, will ingore any keyboard requests other than
the toggle key pressed by itself. This was done to protect the callers
current application from receiving any stray input. When the toggle key
is pressed by itself, NOYB will restore the callers original video environ
ment, and return the caller to exactly where he was prior to toggling NOYB
active.
I have yet to find an application (which works in text mode) that
NOYB acts badly with, however that doesn't mean one dosen't exist. It
works for blanking the screen when SideKick is loaded and/or currently
displaying one of it's windows, especially the NotePad window, which would
probably be the most likely of SideKick's windows to contain confidential
information.
As stated before, I needed a utility to perform NOYB's function,
(without giving up the amount of memory SuperKey would use), and it
works fine for me and others that I have given a copy to. So, if you
also find NOYB useful, feel free to use it and/or give copies of it away.
Very nice! Thank you for this wonderful archive. I wonder why I found it only now. Long live the BBS file archives!
This is so awesome! 😀 I’d be cool if you could download an entire archive of this at once, though.
But one thing that puzzles me is the “mtswslnkmcjklsdlsbdmMICROSOFT” string. There is an article about it here. It is definitely worth a read: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/mtswslnk/