Once upon a time (c. 1990-1997), most programs were written for DOS, and some amount of command line knowledge was required to run them. Installers were typica

Once upon a time (c. 1990-1997), most programs were written for DOS, and some amount of command line knowledge was required to run them. Installers were typically batch files (the DOS equivalent of shell scripts), which was really cool: You could see exactly what they were doing [1], and you could improve your command-line-fu by seeing the techniques people used [2]. [1] Usually it was just copying the application files from directory to directory. Nowadays installers generally muck with the Registry, C:\Progra~1 [3], C:\Users\Applic~1 [3], the Desktop (who knows where that is), the Start Menu, and the Windows equivalent of /etc/init.d (I remember there are several of them, and your system will get slower...and...slow...er...if you don't clean them out regularly) [2] Like environment variables or @ECHO OFF. [3] Spaces in filenames need to die. Whenever possible I use the 8-character names Windows generates for backwards compatibility with DOS.