Power-Choice

A menu system for MS-DOS, written by Olaf Gottschalk between 1989 and 1994.

Power-Choice was the first thing a PC showed after booting: a full-screen menu from which users started their programs, without having to know a single DOS command. It had password protection, a screen saver, a clock in the corner, a DOS shell window, a few handy tools and, of course, Tetris.

This repository is a museum. It contains the original source code as it was found on old backup CDs, every surviving version in its own commit with its original date, and a working build that still runs in DOSBox today.

▶ Play both versions in your browser

The original 1993 PCHOICE.EXE (version 3.1) running in DOSBox-X in 2026. The menu entries are a reconstruction of a typical installation of the time. The Tetris game was played by a small program, not by hand: with the emulator's clock fixed, the game's random pieces could be predicted, and tools/tetris-plan.py planned every move.

The story

Germany: shareware

Power-Choice started in Germany, as the menu that Bartels Computer Systeme GmbH (BCS), run by a distant relative of my mother, installed on the PCs it sold. I also passed it around as shareware from home in Bad Nenndorf, with an order form asking for a "suggested donation of $20 or 40 DM".

Wyoming: Softwhere Associates

Then I spent a high school year at Evanston High in Evanston, Wyoming, and graduated there in May 1990. My maths teacher there was Robert W. Codner, and one of the surviving shareware order forms is his, dated 2/6/90 (scan). On 29 May 1990, the date of the 1.0e commit in this repository, Bob and I signed a partnership agreement and founded Softwhere Associates. Bob funded advertising, marketing and distribution from a business account he had opened with $1,000. Profits were to be split 50/50, or 70/30 in his favour until the advertising money was back. For a 16-year-old that was a great feeling. Our letterhead had two addresses, P.O. Box 2061 in Evanston and Bad Nenndorf, West Germany, and a slogan: The Bottom Line in Quality Software! Bob paid for the Turbo Pascal license, wrote the documentation with me and handled distribution from P.O. Box 2061 in Evanston. There was a printed flyer (page 2, order form), a boxed package with a 14-page User's Guide (scan, text), and a price of $29.95 per copy, with site licenses down to $14.98 per seat.

We even placed an ad in PC World in September 1990, two columns wide and six inches deep, in the catalogue section at the back of the magazine. Its toll-free number rang at an answering service in Evanston, at any hour of any day of the year. The staff there were excited to take orders, and they answered every call with "Hello: Softwhere Associates & Math Criterion Center". Math Criterion Center was Bob's maths-book business.

Softwhere Associates, May 1990, around my graduation from Evanston High: me (left) and Bob Codner with the finished Power-Choice packages.

Power-Choice 1.0 is the version from that time: English throughout, with an installer and a MAKEDISK tool that produced numbered distribution disks. Its Info box still reads:

Power-Choice Version 1.0e
(C) 1990 Softwhere Associates

Programming+Design : Olaf Gottschalk
Documentation      : Robert W. Codner
                     and Olaf Gottschalk
───────────────────────────────────────────────────
 Special Thanks to my parents who gave me a chance
   to experience more than I ever expected !
                     Olaf Gottschalk, May '90

No executable of 1.0 has survived, but the flyer and the User's Guide show what it looked like:

1.0e, rebuilt in 2026

Everything 1.0e needs did survive, so it can be built again: Borland released Turbo Pascal 5.5, the compiler from May 1989 that I used, as free "antique software", and the resident driver assembles with JWasm, an open-source MASM clone. tools/build-1.0e.sh turns the sources at tag v1.0e into the distribution disk in v1/disk: PCHINST.EXE and PCHOICE.DAT, the container that my own PREINST program packed PCHOICE.EXE and PCH_LL.COM into. The build is reproducible to the byte.

Installed from that disk in DOSBox-X, it looks like this, here in colour next to the black-and-white screenshots of 1990. For the comparison the DOS clock was set to the date and time of the flyer's screenshot, 05/18/90 around 5 pm:

In motion: the installation from the floppy, at roughly the speed of a 1990 PC, ending with PCH_LL loading and its clock appearing in the top right corner of the DOS screen ...

... and a tour: the menu with its help line, the Program Info, the Edit Mode, then Esc to DOS, where the resident clock keeps running, and PCH to come back, just as the User's Guide describes.

Back in Germany: Turbo Vision

Back home, Power-Choice was rewritten from scratch on Turbo Vision. Versions 3.x are German again and were distributed by BCS, as their About box says.

Looking back

How it started

My first programming language was UCSD Pascal, on an Apple II. My first PC was an XT clone with an 8088, which I soon upgraded to a NEC V20. The V20.INC in the 1.0 sources still holds the macros for the extra instructions that the V20 knew and my assembler didn't. The whole family shared that PC and its 20 MB hard disk, and Power-Choice began as a way to help my father and my younger brothers get to their programs without typing DOS commands.

At fifteen or so I had picked up the idea of shareware and liked it. It never went anywhere, because nobody knew about it. BCS did go somewhere: Bartels Computer Systeme was run by a distant relative of my mother. I did an internship there, and Power-Choice ended up on the PCs they sold. I can't remember what they paid me for it.

Wyoming

In 1989 the exchange organisation GIVE placed me with a family in Evanston, Wyoming. Their computer was hooked up to the TV and was weaker than a Commodore VIC-20; all I could do on it was play Donkey Kong. So I looked for a better computer at school. In the computer class, Pascal 2, every student had an Apple II, the machine my journey had started on. The teacher soon noticed that I already knew everything he planned to teach, and gave me a seat at the side, at the only IBM in the room, a PS/2. While the class learned Pascal, I worked on my own projects.

I met Bob Codner while looking for a maths class that could still teach me something. In the first weeks I moved up the ladder a few times and ended up in Calculus AB. Bob soon heard that I "did my own thing" in the computer lab. One day I gave him a copy of Power-Choice, and founding Softwhere Associates to make it a product was his idea. At sixteen, that felt great.

The last work on 1.0e happened in the final months of my year, on Bob's 386. It was by far the most powerful computer I had ever seen, and next to it stood another gadget I loved: a laser printer. Bob was a teacher and a salesman, he sold maths books to other teachers, and his office was set up for it. I had already translated the program into English; on his PC I did the final clean-up. And Bob bought Turbo Pascal 5.5 Professional from Borland, which Softwhere then owned. My luggage home was heavy enough already: I was carrying an old half-height 10 MB hard disk, to give our XT 50% more capacity, plus a floppy drive. So in August Bob sent the Pascal package after me by air mail, "$54 just for the postage!!" It was my first legal Turbo Pascal, with objects. In 2026 the same version of that compiler rebuilt 1.0e from the source in this repository.

At home I kept working on Power-Choice and sent Bob a new version. He liked the mouse support, and was relieved that I had already fixed a problem he had written to me about urgently. Bob also had the next product in mind. On 12 August 1990 he sent me four pages of specifications for a test generator for maths teachers, from Basic Math to Calculus BC. It would shuffle the questions into several versions of one test ("a BIG marketing feature") and print them on a laser printer. "I'll leave the design of the different screens to you; you are good at that." He also turned down my name for it: "Power Test is OK but I think we have enough Power already." I started on it, but it never got far, and nothing of it survives.

Power-Choice was never a financial success. The ad cost $5,500. It was black and white, packed in among the many ads at the back of the issue, and in October Bob wrote that it had brought four sales and 24 requests for brochures. A few callers wanted to see a demo first. Counting the copies Bob sold to people he knew, we sold maybe half a dozen. And Bob had seen it coming. In August 1990, explaining the expensive ad, he wrote: "I figure we needed to make a bold move since 'Windows' is the up & coming thing and will probably make menus obsolete in time. Do you agree??" He didn't give up, though: "Remember: my books did not sell at first either!!"

One customer, the PC coordinator of a bank, sent the program back for a refund: "After modifying the PCH batch file to include the low-level driver it would not keep the changes." Bob forwarded it with a question of his own: what did she mean by the "low-level driver"? Looking back, it was my first meeting with a problem that has stayed with me ever since: a bug report tells you what someone saw, not what they did. My best guess is that she added PCH_LL, the resident part, to PCH.BAT by hand. But the installer loads PCH_LL from AUTOEXEC.BAT, and PCH.BAT is a file nobody should ever touch: Power-Choice rewrites it every time it starts a program, so her change was bound to disappear.

We lost contact in 1991. A lot happens when you come home from a year abroad, and I lost touch with almost everyone in Evanston. I still wonder whether I could reconnect, and who is still alive.

Back in Germany

I came back from the USA in June 1990, a few weeks shy of 17. Approaching my 18th birthday, I got a real contract with BCS, and I kept working for them alongside university. BCS was a local Compaq dealer whose customers were small and medium-sized offices, and networks were the hot topic: Novell was installed everywhere. That is where the network edition 3.1n comes from: one menu, managed centrally for all the PCs of an office.

The 3.0 rewrite came from Turbo Vision. I was amazed when Borland released this "graphical" user interface, and I spent quite some time learning everything about this new thing called OOP. ;-) User interfaces were a very good playground for objects.

Then Windows arrived, just as Bob had predicted in 1990, and Windows was the end of every menu program of the time. We were simply too late to the party.

Afterwards

I studied electrical engineering, but that was a side quest. I stayed a programmer, and I still am. During my studies I wrote custom software, some of it for BCS and some on my own: warehouse and order management for a chain of kiosks, a client database for a lawyer, and once the reconstruction of the book list of a library that had burned down. To get its insurance money, the library had to recover partial data from relational database systems that no longer ran. All of it in Pascal, and later in Delphi.

Reading it again

Reading my code from back then, more than 30 years later, I am honestly a bit amazed. I think I can see my clean code style emerging. What I can't see is a single test: unit testing was not something I had learned, and I wonder whether it was a thing at all in 90s Pascal.

What I would never in the world do again: put a space before an exclamation mark, like this ! The 1.0 sources do it 24 times, and the installer even greets you with Welcome to Power-Choice !!. Version 3.1 was almost cured, but the habit came back in my next projects for years. How horrible.

My message to the kid at Bob's 386: keep it up. That 386 is by far not it!

A code review, 36 years late

Olaf asked Claude for a review of the sources in v1/ and v3/. Here it is.

Verdict: approved, with comments.

What works:

• Objects from day one. In 1990 PCH_DEF.PAS already models the menu as objects: Item, Group and MenuObj, each with Init/Done, ReadF/WriteF, Edit and Run. That is Turbo Pascal 5.5, the first version with objects at all, released only the year before.
• Names that say what they do, such as SwitchGroup, ChangePasswords and OpenBatchFile. Reading the code in 2026 rarely required guessing.
• The 3.0 rewrite is a real class hierarchy. TMenuItem with TDosItem and TGroupItem below it, virtual Execute and Edit, and Load/Store on Turbo Vision streams. Option bits are named constants (miClock, miScreensaver, miWait), and error codes too (PathNotFound, BatchFileError). This is what the 1.0 code wanted to be.
• Close to the metal, but documented. Max and Min are five instructions of inline machine code, with the assembly written next to every byte.

Requested changes:

• Comments. PCH_DEF.PAS has 1,368 lines and not a single comment; PCHMENU.PAS in 3.x has 8 in 977 lines. The names carry a lot, but the batch-file loop and the handshake with the resident part had to be reconstructed from the code.
• Magic numbers in 1.0: PutMsg(5), Case C^.Typ Of 0, 256+72 for cursor up. 3.0 fixed this; 1.0 still needs it.
• Goto Done, six times in INSTALL.PAS. A cleanup path from before Pascal had try/finally. Forgiven.
• Tests: none. Also forgiven. Kent Beck's SUnit for Smalltalk came in 1994, JUnit in 1997, DUnit for Delphi around 2000. In 1990 the test suite for a menu program was your younger brothers.

Verified: in 2026 it still compiles with Turbo Pascal 5.5 and runs. Ship it.

As seen on TV… almost

Softwhere Associates never had a TV commercial. In 2026 it got one anyway: 39 seconds in the style of an American late-night ad of 1990, seen on a curved CRT, with the slogans of the original flyer. The DOS scenes use the real VGA font, the product shots show the real 1.0e and the 1990 package, a synthetic narrator ("Reed") sells, and the classic Mac voice "Fred" plays the computer that answers Bad command or file name. The jingle is synthesized. The spot is marked as a 2026 homage throughout, and the 800 number on the end card is a fictional 555 number. tools/tv-ad/make.sh makes it from scratch on a Mac.

Version history

1.0e and 3.x share little more than the name: 3.0 was written from scratch, and less than 1% of its code also appears in 1.0e. They therefore live side by side, in v1/ and v3/. Each version is one commit, dated with the timestamp of the newest file in the archive it came from, and tagged; git log v3/ shows how 3.x evolved:

Tag	Date	What happened
v1.0e	1990-05-29	The US edition by Softwhere Associates. Turbo Pascal 5.5 with a home-grown text-mode window library (DESKTOP.PAS), a hypertext help viewer, an installer, a disk-building tool and a resident low-level driver in MASM.
v3.0	1992-10-03	Back in Germany: complete rewrite on Borland's Turbo Vision, distributed by BCS. Menu groups, password driver, screen savers for EGA/VGA, CGA and Hercules, Tetris, a calendar and the Kobold file manager.
v3.01	1993-08-26	First MAKEFILE; calendar and file manager removed again.
v3.02	1993-09-06	Cleanup, reworked drivers.
v3.1	1993-09-13	Registration, group and program editors, hard-disk cleanup, much larger online help.
v3.1n	1994-01-17	Network edition: shared program directory (PCHGLOBAL) and per-user settings (PCHUSER).

Neither the original German versions from before the US year nor any 2.x version have survived.

How it worked

Power-Choice 3.x is a Turbo Vision application written in Turbo Pascal 6.0, using overlays to fit into 640 KB, with all dialogs, menus and strings kept in a Turbo Vision resource file that is appended to the EXE. Some details that were typical for the time:

• Three programs instead of one. PCHPW.SYS is a device driver, loaded as the first line of CONFIG.SYS, that asks for the system password before DOS has even finished booting. PCHEGA.COM (or its CGA/Hercules siblings) is a TSR that draws the clock, blanks the screen after a while and keeps Power-Choice's state between runs; the menu finds it through interrupt vector 60h and refuses to start without it. PCHOICE.EXE is the menu itself.
• Getting out of the way. A DOS program can't run another one while using all the memory itself. Power-Choice therefore writes the commands of the chosen menu entry into PCH.BAT, exits, lets the batch file run them, and is restarted by a GOTO $AGAIN at the end. A "quick" mode shrinks the heap and runs small programs directly instead.
• Copy protection. REGISTER.EXE searches PCHOICE.EXE for the marker USERREG and patches in the owner's name, company and serial number, lightly encrypted. An unregistered copy proudly shows „Serien-Nr.: ! RAUBKOPIE !" ("pirated copy") in its About box.

Repository layout

v1/             Power-Choice 1.0e (1990, Softwhere Associates, English)
  src/          source code
  disk/         distribution disk, rebuilt from src/ in 2026
v3/             Power-Choice 3.x (1992-1994, BCS, German)
  src/          source code, 3.1n at HEAD
    ASM/        low-level drivers (Turbo Assembler, IDEAL mode)
    REZFILES/   dialogs, strings and help text for the resource file
  bin/          compiled 3.1 distribution, byte for byte as archived
docs/           browser demo (index.html, play/), screenshots, recordings,
                the TV spot (tv-ad/),
                and in docs/1990 the Softwhere Associates
                flyer, ad, order forms, User's Guide (scan and text) and
                package photo
tools/          the helpers used in 2026 for screenshots, recordings, the
                1.0e rebuild, the TV spot (tools/tv-ad) and the social
                preview image

To look at an older 3.x version, check out its tag, e.g. git checkout v3.0.

Running it

The easiest way is the browser demo (docs/index.html, served by GitHub Pages from the docs folder): both versions, ready to use, in js-dos. The demo bundles in docs/play were made with tools/make-bundle.py from the same states as the screenshots: 1.0e installed from v1/disk with the menu of the 1990 flyer, and 3.1 with the demo menu, registered with its own REGISTER.EXE.

The menu entries start stand-ins instead of the real programs of the time (tools/standin.asm): one small program that names itself after its file (WP.COM says it stands in for WordPerfect 5.1) and returns on any key. So the demo shows Power-Choice stepping aside through PCH.BAT, the resident clock drawn over another program, and, in 3.1, the screen saver. For the demo, the copy of PCHEGA.COM in the bundle waits one minute instead of five before switching the screen off: one word changed, at offset 31; the original in v3/bin is untouched. 3.1 runs on js-dos's DOSBox-X core, because the plain DOSBox core does not emulate the VGA blanking the screen saver uses.

To run it locally instead:

Copy the contents of v3/bin/ into a directory, mount it in DOSBox-X or DOSBox as C:\PCHOICE (the path is built in), and start:

C:\PCHOICE> PCHEGA
C:\PCHOICE> PCHOICE

The first start complains that there is no menu file yet. Use Bearbeiten → Editmodus (F2) and F3 to add entries; Alt-X saves them to PCHOICE.MNU on exit. PCHPW.SYS can be loaded with DEVICE= in a DOSBox-X CONFIG.SYS if you want the boot-time password prompt as well.

For 1.0e, mount v1/disk as a floppy and install it like in 1990 (choose Custom Installation: Easy reboots the machine at the end):

Z:\> MOUNT A path/to/v1/disk -t floppy
Z:\> A:
A:\> PCHINST
A:\> C:\PCHOICE\PCH_LL
A:\> C:\PCHOICE\PCHOICE

F1 shows the Program Info, F2 enters the Edit Mode.

Building it

1.0e builds from this repository with tools/build-1.0e.sh, given Borland's tp55.zip and a JWasm binary (see the script).

3.x can't be built from this repository alone. v3/src/MAKEFILE expects Turbo Pascal 6.0, Turbo Assembler, TVRM and TVHC. Power-Choice also used several units of my own that were kept elsewhere and have not survived: StrUtl, StrObj, TextObj, DateUtl, DosTools, HintStat and Editor. They were a shared library: the 1993 Kiosk project on the same backups uses them too and does not contain them either. Fields turned up in that project and is now in v3/src. Calc, Gadgets, HelpFile and AsciiTab came from Borland's Turbo Vision demo programs.

Notes on this archive

• Preserved: this repository is archived at Software Heritage. The code as first published in October 2026 has the permanent identifier swh:1:dir:f8e81dbfd1bc6b4e591ef9da5ab7fb3f724f92bd; the release has the 3.1 distribution and the 1.0e install disk as downloads.
• Sources: PCH3-00.ARJ … PCH3-10B.ARJ and Pch1-00.zip, found on backup CDs. The file contents are unchanged except that text files were converted from code page 437 to UTF-8 (so umlauts and box-drawing characters show up on GitHub) and the DOS end-of-file marker (^Z) was removed. Line endings are still CRLF. To build in DOS again, convert back with iconv -f UTF-8 -t CP437.
• Recovered: v3/src/FIELDS.PAS was not in the Power-Choice archives. It comes from KIOSK12C.ARJ (8 June 1993), a project for a chain of kiosks on the same backups (now its own repository), and is the unit Power-Choice 3.x uses: the stream IDs it registers match PCHOVR1.PAS. It is ASCII and unchanged.
• Not included: compiled intermediates (.TPU, .OBJ, .EXE built from the tree), Turbo Pascal IDE state (TURBO.TP, TURBO.DSK), and third-party files that were lying around in the 1.0 directory: IBM's VDISK.ASM sample driver, the Microsoft MASM 5.0 macro files MIXED.INC, DOS.INC and BIOS.INC, and Borland's unmodified OBJECTS.PAS demo unit, which is part of the free Turbo Pascal 5.5 download.
• 1990 documents: scanned from my own papers. On Bob's order form, his street address, phone number and signature are blacked out; my own old street address is blacked out on the order form and the flyer.
• Screenshots and recordings: made by loading a small TSR (tools/scrdump.asm) next to Power-Choice that types keystrokes from a script into the BIOS keyboard buffer and saves the text screen at a fixed rate (once per second for screenshots, about 4.5 times per second for recordings). tools/keys.py compiles the key scripts, tools/render.py turns the dumps into PNGs using the VGA ROM font, and into animated GIFs. Nothing is retouched: every pixel comes from the text screen Power-Choice actually drew.

Third-party code

Not everything in this repository is mine:

• v1/src/FORMS.PAS is Borland's FORMS.PAS demo unit from Turbo Pascal 5.5, Copyright (c) 1989 Borland International, with a few changes of mine (no window coordinates, a different colour). It needs Borland's OBJECTS.PAS from the same demo set, and only the MAKEDISK tool uses it; Power-Choice itself does not. Borland made Turbo Pascal 5.5 free to download, but it is not open source, so this file is not covered by the MIT license.
• v3/src/FIELDS.PAS is Borland's FIELDS.PAS from the Turbo Vision forms demo of Turbo Pascal 6.0, Copyright (c) 1990 Borland International, with TRealInputLine added by me. It is not covered by the MIT license either.
• docs/play/js-dos is an unmodified excerpt of js-dos 8.5.3 by Alexander Guryanov, with its DOSBox and DOSBox-X cores, GPL-2.0; see its notice.
• v3/src uses Turbo Vision and its demo units (Calc, Gadgets, HelpFile, AsciiTab) by Borland; they are not included.

License

MIT, for everything I wrote; see Third-party code for the exceptions. The names of products shown in the screenshots belong to their respective owners.