Universal Copy System Link for 97 Windows PCs

In 1997 I wrote UcsLink.Fusion for the University of Geneva. We had hundreds of PCs across the city, Sun and Windows NT servers, and Windows 95 and Linux workstations. Getting a user’s software and settings onto whichever PC they sat down at was a job for login scripts. I wrote a Delphi 2.0 application to do it instead. UCS stood for Universal Copy System. Fusion read a script that mapped network drives, copied shared software, created shortcuts, connected printers, set environment variables and synchronized the clock. It could include other scripts, test conditions and clean up files left by a previous run. The surviving configuration maps a personal drive, a software drive and a group drive, then chooses printers based on the workstation’s location. A user could disable optional software rather than wait for it to copy at every login, or install it later by double-clicking its icon. Administrators could make tasks mandatory and protect individual options. A tree showed the tasks and…