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ALed (ALan's Text Editor) version 1.53 now free (Announce)

posted by rr Homepage E-mail, Berlin, Germany, 13.05.2025, 22:18

ALed is a small (75 KiB) but powerful text editor (see screenshots below). Last version was 1.53 from April 1991. (This version number is from the archive's name, but ALed's binary and accompanying .doc or .hlp file read 1.51 or 1.50. :confused:)

Although version 1.01 was distributed as 'FREEWare/Public Domain', at least version 1.5x was distributed as 'ShareWare'.

Alan Boulanger, author of ALed, send the following message to me.

From: Alan Boulanger <aboulang -AT- umass -DOT- edu>
To: Robert Riebisch <rr -AT- bttr-software -DOT- de>
Subject: Re: ALed text editor
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2025 09:20:45 -0400

Hi Robert,

Ah.. that takes me back. At the time no programming editors had
everything that I wanted so I wrote my own and sold it as shareware.

I am very happy to hear you're enjoying it.. The ASCII table and
programmer's calculator are my favorite features. It was a lot of fun to
write in Borlands Turbo C using only the standard C libraries so I had
to write all of the windowing software from scratch ( using direct video
paging ). The guy who wrote some ID software ( Commander Keen,
wolfenstein etc ) was a customer as was the Australian Telephone company
who bought a corporate license to place in all of their switches.

> 1) Are you the author of ALed?
Yes!

> 2) Did its source code survive?
Sadly not likely..

> 3) Would you mind to release ALed's source code under a libre license,
> e.g., MIT, GNU GPL...?
I would have as I'm a big fan of open source software

> 4) If sources are not available anymore, would you grant permission for
> commercial and non-commercial use for free (i.e., shareware registration
> is no longer required) and allow reverse engineering plus modification
> of the binary for, e.g., changing key bindings or fixing bugs if any?
I would be happy for others to use it for free providing I retain credit
as the original author in any derivative/modified work and get notified
( I'd be curious )

Thank you for reminding me of something I had fun writing 30+ years ago!!

- Alan


On 4/4/25 3:26 PM, Robert Riebisch wrote:
> Dear Mr. Boulanger,
>
> I hope, you are doing well.
> It might sound strange, but even in 2025 I enjoy to tinker with software
> from the good ol' MS-DOS days in my spare time. Yesterday I stumbled
> upon ALed and found it very useful, because of its features and small
> size. It even includes an ASCII table and a programmer's calculator! :-)
>
> So, my questions are:
> 1) Are you the author of ALed?
> 2) Did its source code survive?
> 3) Would you mind to release ALed's source code under a libre license,
> e.g., MIT, GNU GPL...?
> 4) If sources are not available anymore, would you grant permission for
> commercial and non-commercial use for free (i.e., shareware registration
> is no longer required) and allow reverse engineering plus modification
> of the binary for, e.g., changing key bindings or fixing bugs if any?
>
> Cheers,
> Robert

Links

* https://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/pc/garbo/pc/editor/aled153.zip
* https://discmaster.textfiles.com/file/12465/floppyshareware.zip/floppyshareware/LUNACY/ALEDV1.ZIP
* Alan Boulanger : Department of Mathematics and Statistics : UMass Amherst

Screenshots

Main editing window:
[image]

Help screen:
[image]

Calculator:
[image]

ASCII table:
[image]

Maybe someone wants to heal the clock's y2k issue:
[image]

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