Pretty much everybody in the Apple II community is aware of Beagle Bros, the prolific and playful early software company with a sense of humor and a hacker spirit. But it’s probably not nearly as well known that they actually did test the waters with an IBM PC title as well. FileMover was that title. I got ahold of a copy of it, kind of crushed but still shrink-wrapped.
This thing is rare. To find one still wrapped is even more rare, but it doesn’t do a lot of good wrapped. So, I opened it up, and here is what I found. First, the box panels:
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Inside the box was the disk, along with a little insert with instructions (though still Apple-centric) on what to do if the disk goes bad, a sticker, the manual, and a wall poster. With Apple titles, the wall poster was generally some useful programming information, likes “Peeks & Pokes” or 6502 opcodes. In the FileMover package, the wall poster has some Pascal programming information on one side, and the disk treatment warning graphics on the other.
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The program itself is a relatively straightforward file handling utility, allowing you to delete files, rename them, move them around, etc.
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The disk includes the Pascal source code for the program, as well as a couple of other things. There’s actually an “Easter Egg” of a sort as well. There’s a hidden file called DONTREAD.ME, which you can see in the file listing above, but which does not appear in a regular DIR of the disk. If you TYPE DONTREAD.ME, you get a secret message. I’m going to reveal it here.
Anyway, although the program itself is ok, it’s probably mostly interesting due to the fact that—as far as I know, at least—it is the only program Beagle Bros ever released for the PC. And the Pascal source code is probably interesting to look through as well. Someday I might do that.
Here are links to all the stuff. When I tried to run this under FreeDOS, it didn’t work, but it did work under DOS 3.3 at least. I captured the disk image using a Kryoflux, although the image is not protected. At the moment, the disk image is a bit larger than it needs to be I think, but it did work under emulation.