Alarm is, as its name suggests, a small alarm program for DOS. It lets you set periodic alarms (once an hour, once every Monday at 10 AM, etc.) or special one-shot alarms for specific times. When the alarm goes off, your computer beeps, and a message of your own design scrolls across the top of the screen. You can also push a special combination of keys (of your choice) to pop up the time, and any impending alarms, at the top of the screen, even if you're running some other program. Alarm runs as a TSR ("terminate-and-stay-resident") program at bootup, so it's always ready and waiting (like a screensaver, which is also a TSR program); but it only uses a few K of your computer's precious RAM. Plus, Alarm is absolutely free.

If you happen to be a witch, or some other sort of pagan -- or if (like me), you're just sympathetic to paganesque stuff -- you'll be happy to know that Alchemy MindWorks makes a Pagan Daybook for DOS that tells you any pagan feast dates, or other events of witchy significance, on today's date. To register your version, the author asks that you buy a copy of his pagan novel.

Ca is a small program which shows you a calendar of the current, previous, and next months. Sundays of the current month are in a different color (though it works OK without color), and the current date blinks, to tell you "you are here". If you're not using a menu system, this is a simple way of having a calendar all the same.

TerraTime draws a map of the world, with the current time in dozens of major cities. The map is in color, but I've got it working fine on 8088s with monochrome screens. The program lets you pick which cities show up on the map, and even calculates the distance between any two selected cities in both statute and nautical miles.

Dosclock is a tiny program that puts a clock in the upper right-hand corner of your DOS screen, which conveniently disappears while you're running programs. If you don't use a menu, and just stick with the DOS prompt, this is a handy way to tell the time.

Of course, if you want the time and date completely on the cheap, you can always just build them into the DOS prompt. In your autoexec.bat file, you should have a setting for the prompt -- typically, something like:

prompt $p$g

"$p" puts the current DOS directory (path) in the prompt, while "$g" adds the familar greater-than sign (">"). To include the date, add "$d"; for the time, add "$t". "$b" puts in a convenient vertical bar ("|") as a divider. Altogether you could change the line in autoexec.bat to read:

prompt $d$b$t$b$p$g

to get a prompt like this:

Fri 09-12-1997|23:56:59.51|C:\>

Finally, if you've got an 8088 or 286 on a LAN (Local Area Network), here's a cool solution I've found for keeping the time set on these older computers. With the first couple of 8088s I worked on, I'd set up a cool little menu system, complete with clock and calendar, but neither worked because the computer didn't keep the right time when shut off. (Maybe the clock battery went dead, I don't know.) Pdclkset is a program that uses the computer's packet driver to shoot to the mainframe on the LAN, grab the current time and date, and set them in DOS. If you set up autoexec.bat to start the packet driver, and then run Pdclkset, at bootup, you'll always have the right time and date once you get to the menu screen or DOS prompt. Pdclkset is contained in a larger, zipped bundle of programs called "Pdtst".