My first exposure to MS-DOS was at my aunt’s house. She had an old IBM computer in the basement. It had an amber monitor, and all the words on the screen were a hideous shade of orange. Up to that point, I had only seen green monitors. Still, the letters were sharp and the computer was competent for the era. I sat down and started typing.
The first thing I entered was my name. In the early days of computers, this was a thrill. It was almost like being on TV. Unfortunately, my name was not a valid command, which MS-DOS told be with a brusque error message:
BAD COMMAND OR FILENAME
I had used an Apple ][ computer at school, and thanks to my gifted and talented class, I knew a few BASIC commands. I tried typing a number of commands and lines of code, but every time I hit the Enter key, MS-DOS gave me the same response:
BAD COMMAND OR FILENAME
I knew there was a big difference between Apple and IBM computers, but I also knew that every computer of the era had the BASIC programming language. However, I did not realize that there was a distinction between BASIC and MS-DOS. They both had a black screen with green/orange/gray letters, and they both had cryptic commands and impenetrable error messages.
A year or two later, I got my own computer, an IBM-compatible computer known as the Tandy 1000HX. I quickly got adept at dealing with both GW-BASIC and MS-DOS. But even though I was pretty good at it, I was glad to move over to Microsoft Windows when it came out. Perhaps it’s because I’m a visually-oriented person, but I’ll take a graphical user interface over a command line any day. And while I have fond memories of my old computers, I can honestly say that I don’t miss MS-DOS.
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August 29, 2012 at 12:12 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
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December 31, 2012 at 1:23 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
[...] of it is thanks to a cartoon dog named Rover and a half-baked user interface called Microsoft Bob. MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows may have made Bill Gates a billionaire, but Microsoft Bob brought him [...]
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January 14, 2013 at 8:26 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
[...] completely different platforms. The Windows code, used in Windows 95 and 98, was based on the old MS-DOS operating system, whereas the Windows NT system was built from the ground up with modern software [...]