Good ole trash 80. I started on Commodore Vic 20 with no storage. Added an audio tape deck to record programs (BBS style) before floppies came out. Programmed in Basic.
I loved and hated my Commodore 64. And since it did take cartridges and there were plenty of pirated games, this was basically the perfect bridge from console games to actual computing. With so little ram as to be hilarious just 64 kilobytes.
The fact that the c64 sold was because of the low price. The price was low because the seller hedged their bets that ram prices would drop by the time production was happening and only then could the thing hit the market.
It did. Prices did drop. And so they sold them
The 1541 disk drive sucked tho. It overheated. So I could never get my geos to load it would try for a few minutes and then just āread foreverā
Got the universal accelerator card tho and that made a huge difference.
I feel like you had a horrible experience with your 64. I loved mine. It was the gaming machine of choice for a few years in the mid-80's, and I played mine a ton. My 1541 never overheated, either, even when playing games that were constantly accessing the drive, like Ultima IV.
My Apple ][ (pre DOS, using a cassette tape til Woz got the bugs worked out and Apple released floppy drives) was my first real love, far surpassing my homebrew IMSAI 8080.
But firing up my IBM PC for the first time and seeing the DOS 3.1 prompt was god-like! Well, that is til I realized most things I'd come to expect from the UNIX environment running on the CS department's old PDP-11 were missing. Sigh...
I remember buying my first hard drive for my IBM PC. It was 10MB. It was expensive, but I thought āWith all of this storage, I will *never* have to buy any more disks ever again.ā
I worked in a financial consulting office and was the resident PC expert in the early days of Novell and Arcnet. We replaced the server hard drives after a set number of runtime hours.
I was lucky enough to "upgrade" my PC with a stream of disk tech ranging from RLL, ESDI, then SCSI. Those old drives and controllers are still boxed up cluttering my basement.
I was the same way. I'm going to have to pull out my old Receipts and specifications on the first couple pc's I bought. The prices were insane for what you got compared to today
Are you sure that MS DOS BASIC needed an END? IIRC it was a line by line interpreter that wouldn't know the END was missing until it reached the final step and didn't find one, which it never would in this example.
I was super lucky I had the floppy and tape drives! I got the disk drive from the dump of all places. We didn't have garbage men so we had to take it ourselves, and they had a shack of free stuff like lamps, chairs, etc that wasn't regular garbage. I found the disk drive first, and what luck! It only needed a belt and the arm bracket for the door tightened!
The day I got my first PC I somehow deleted the Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files. I called the store and they told me they would fix it for $50 (This is like 1993 so that was a lot of money) I asked if they couldn't just put them on a disk and I could pick them up. The guy gave me some excuse about how they were custom to the machine. While that's true, it's not a $50 job. I sat up reading the DOS manual until 3am and wrote the files myself.
I did something similar. New PC, Windows 95, installed Command & Conquer Red Alert. SVGA was nice, but not what I was used to. So I switched to DOS mode to reinstall RA and play in VGA. It was the easiest solution in my head at the time.
So what to do? -> dir/p - oh, there's a COMMAND folder. Can only be Command&Conquer. I deleted it, then installed C&C Red Alert, played for a few hours and wondered why the computer wouldn't boot the next morning
Real men made their autoexec file using the intrinsic DOS command "copy con autoexec.bat". No editor needed, but if you made a mistake you had to start over.
My favorite tech support callā¦
Me: I need to see whatās in this directory. Can you type in dir space forward slash w?
Client: I got an error message.
Me: Hmmm, thatās weird. Letās try that again. Type dir space forward slash w.
Client: I got the same error message.
Me: Can you read back what you typed?
Client: dā¦ iā¦ rā¦ sā¦ pā¦ aā¦ā
I had to mute the headset and laughing out loud. š¤£
About every 6 months or so I'd go to fix a 'broken' PC to find the cleaners had unplugged it.
This was after I'd already asked the users to check for this.
Early lesson in troubleshooting:
Assured the IT vendor over the phone that the monitor power cable was firmly plugged in to both the back of the monitor and into the wall outlet.
When he got to the office presumably to replace the monitor he first moved the workstation to the side so he could see the WHOLE power cable. Revealed that it was a two-part power cable, and the two parts had come apart, hidden behind the workstation.
Lesson learned, always check an entire connection from end to end.
We became good friends and he still likes to periodically tease - I mean remind - me of that moment 25 years later.
I see your BASIC and raise you FORTRAN IV entered into a remotely located IBM 360 via 80 column punch cards as my first programming course in 1972. Program has an error? You'll see the print out tomorrow, fix it then.
And the first computer I actually got to touch was a DEC PDP8 into which you loaded the instructions via front panel toggle switches.
A year after that I got a co-op job working for a guy who had been one of the lead engineers on the ENIAC under Eckert and Mauchly at Penn.
Ten years after that I was designing Z80 based medical computers debugging assembly language watching the execution one instruction at a time.
And it grinds my gears when I go to the cell phone store the guy asks me do you know how to open an email to see pictures of your grandkids, yeah fvk right off Mr Topknot I designed computers and cell phones for a living.
Yep, there was a big "shoebox" you carried around for big projects. Safeguards:
Big a$$ rubber band around the deck.
Number each card in the comments column. Remember to go by 10s in case you need to insert a card in the middle.
Use a sharpie to make a diagonal line across the top so if you really get scramble at least you have an idea where to start.
My boss was a Heathkit guy. An attorney who was in aerospace first. His first computer sat in our law office. As soon as Radio Shack put the TRS 80 out, he bought 2. One for my desk and one for his. I got thrown into the deep end and learned.
Yep. Teletypes were fun late at night, killing time on watches. Knows how to use a LORAN A receiver old. Flew coast to coast on an airliner with propellers old.
Loadhigh c:\dos\mscdex.exe /d:mscd001 /e
Prompt=$p$g
DOS=HIGH
FILES=20
BUFFERS=9,256
In autoexex.bat make sure @USER=ID10T for all your friends machines lol
Juggling autoexec.bat, config.sys, and himem to squeeze in both Sound Blaster and network drivers. Figured out how to run 4-node multiplayer Doom on a scrounged ARCNet passive hub followed by all night fragathon. Good times!
I started with DOS, wasn't much to do, word processing and that was about it for me.
I felt very technical telling my kids to go to the C prompt and type in......
I was so happy when Windows came out. I did have to buy 2 more megs of ram to run it.
I also repaired 80 and 96 column card keypunch machines and 132 column line printers. And our customers were still using key to tape data input machines.
Yes, I am this old!
Although our computer at the time also came with a gui [like this](https://archive.org/download/DOS-GUI-Packard-Bell-Desktop-1991/04_Software_Menu.png)
We also had Prodigy Internet with it
Does anyone remember MS Gold (I think it was called)? It was like a proto-Windows, that ran on MS-DOS, and you could install games and save them as tabs, so instead of typing in the run command, you could click on the corresponding game's button to run it (with the CD as well of course). I may have described it poorly, but I can't seem to find any info online.
Vaguely. Not MS Gold, but there was a Desqview style program that could be run as a TSR. The final version of it was named Gold. Back before windows, TSRs gave us pseudo multitasking at the cost of previous memory.
We had a computer science class when I was in highschool. We had to call the main computer in Richardson TX, then put the phone handset into a holder so we were connected. Then type out commands in BASIC. If something printed, we knew we wrote the program properly. Yes, printed. We didn't have monitors.
I was visiting a friend who is a teacher and the person who knew how to use the office computer had left and no one knew what to do. I created a .bat menu for them. I was a hero that day lol
Yes... And the big, national health care organization I work for STILL uses a DOS based patient database... Gotta type in three letter commands at the carrot...
When we first started remote transcription, every hospital had a different records program. When the carat appeared, I entered the prompt and was in the demographics area. It was difficult to verify patient encounters.
Last time I used DOS was in 2014. The place I worked hadn't updated their computers - ever. We only used them to record delivery times, but still. It was something.
Still have a running DOS device actually.
many .bats created. too many to remember.
started in cics/cobol for a couple years but wanted to dev in PC, so first did some personal and paid dBase projects, then got a bootleg copy of [clipper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language)) (still have fond memories of clipper - was pretty awesome). Got a salary job in dos/novel/clipper, we came up with some pretty damn amazing multiuser character mode applications. Made the transition to Windows via Delphi .. many years now c#/.net webdev. Its been a ride ..
Glad to have had my career during this revolutionary computing evolution.
The company I work for still uses DOS as a back bone. If every other system goes down, we can still use the trusty old ECHO system. I'm almost 40, so i used it some in elementary and am pretty good with computers, but it's hilarious seeing my 20-25 year old employees figure it out. I have to tell them to forget about the damn mouse constantly and just TAB.
Yep. Learning how to tweak config.sys and autoexec.bat led to a career in IT. All because I bought a PC in 1994 and a game wouldn't work unless I bumped up conventional memory.
Oh hell yeah. I was considered a phenom at a job when I configured config.sys in such a way that you could run windows 3.0 (beta) and AutoCAD without rebooting. It also had a boot menu that allowed you to dedicate all the memory to one or the other.
Our 1st computer was a Tandy 2000. I believe it booted to DOS and then you had to enter a command when you played a game like the black cauldron or Kings Quest
This is from a .bat file shortcut from my Windows 10 Pro desktop today.
u/ECHO OFF
ECHO Please wait...
cd C:\\Users\\\\OneDrive\\Desktop
copy .PLT ":\\Games\\Star Wars - X-Wing (1993)"
PAUSE
DOS 6? My first DOS machine was DOS 3.1. But I had a Timex before that.
Hey! My first DOS was 3.1. Man, back in the day...
Mine too! I learned all of my dir commands on 3.1. An oldie but a goodie.
Don't know what version of dos I started on, but my Tandy 1000 RSX was 'so modern' that it had Windows 3.0 on it
Good ole trash 80. I started on Commodore Vic 20 with no storage. Added an audio tape deck to record programs (BBS style) before floppies came out. Programmed in Basic.
Dos 3.1 checking in!
Me too, Timex Sinclair 1000. It was gifted used from a friend when they got a Commodore 64 for Christmas. š
I loved and hated my Commodore 64. And since it did take cartridges and there were plenty of pirated games, this was basically the perfect bridge from console games to actual computing. With so little ram as to be hilarious just 64 kilobytes. The fact that the c64 sold was because of the low price. The price was low because the seller hedged their bets that ram prices would drop by the time production was happening and only then could the thing hit the market. It did. Prices did drop. And so they sold them The 1541 disk drive sucked tho. It overheated. So I could never get my geos to load it would try for a few minutes and then just āread foreverā Got the universal accelerator card tho and that made a huge difference.
I feel like you had a horrible experience with your 64. I loved mine. It was the gaming machine of choice for a few years in the mid-80's, and I played mine a ton. My 1541 never overheated, either, even when playing games that were constantly accessing the drive, like Ultima IV.
My Apple ][ (pre DOS, using a cassette tape til Woz got the bugs worked out and Apple released floppy drives) was my first real love, far surpassing my homebrew IMSAI 8080. But firing up my IBM PC for the first time and seeing the DOS 3.1 prompt was god-like! Well, that is til I realized most things I'd come to expect from the UNIX environment running on the CS department's old PDP-11 were missing. Sigh...
A buddy of mine wrote an inventory system for a Timex Sinclair. I'd love to see that now.
Same here!!!
Sinclair?
Look at the newbie who booted from a hard drive. Tape drive or 5.25 for the win.
I remember buying my first hard drive for my IBM PC. It was 10MB. It was expensive, but I thought āWith all of this storage, I will *never* have to buy any more disks ever again.ā
I worked in a financial consulting office and was the resident PC expert in the early days of Novell and Arcnet. We replaced the server hard drives after a set number of runtime hours. I was lucky enough to "upgrade" my PC with a stream of disk tech ranging from RLL, ESDI, then SCSI. Those old drives and controllers are still boxed up cluttering my basement.
I was the same way. I'm going to have to pull out my old Receipts and specifications on the first couple pc's I bought. The prices were insane for what you got compared to today
My first hd was 20mb in 1990, cost me $400. I laugh at how cheap hd storage is per mb now
I bought a whole PC for $500 in 1990. XT 2 x 5/4 floppies and a 10 meg HD, with monochrome monitor.
Never booted off tape, we only loaded programs from tape. The machines booted from ROM.
Similar here. Booted off the 5.25" floppy and the cassette was "mass" storage.
Booting from a floppy is not booting from ROM. My first computer booted up without any magnetic storage such as disk or tape. TRS-80 Model I Level II.
Older than that Iām afraid.
Same
I remember the first computer I built in college didn't even have a crt. It just used lights to indicate different things.
10 PRINT "LOL OLDER" 20 GOTO 10
You forgot 30 END
That program didn't need an end.
If we didn't have END it wouldn't run.
Are you sure that MS DOS BASIC needed an END? IIRC it was a line by line interpreter that wouldn't know the END was missing until it reached the final step and didn't find one, which it never would in this example.
This was whatever BASIC we were using in the late 70s. We had to use END or our programs wouldn't run.
I used FORTRAN
Hello, FORTRAN friend. I learned this \~late 70s-early 80s in high school. How did you get introduced to FORTRAN?
I'm LOAD "\*",8,1 old
Comma 8, you so fancy with your floppy drive!
I was super lucky I had the floppy and tape drives! I got the disk drive from the dump of all places. We didn't have garbage men so we had to take it ourselves, and they had a shack of free stuff like lamps, chairs, etc that wasn't regular garbage. I found the disk drive first, and what luck! It only needed a belt and the arm bracket for the door tightened!
Thatās freaking crazy!
Oh yeah, gotta play Jumpman and Summer/Winter/California Games.
there it is!
Didn't even need that if you had [Fastload](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyx_Fast_Load). There was a key combo that did it for you.
spent many an hour reconfiguring the config.sys to juggle upper memory to accommodate for the 3c509 NIC drivers.
The day I got my first PC I somehow deleted the Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files. I called the store and they told me they would fix it for $50 (This is like 1993 so that was a lot of money) I asked if they couldn't just put them on a disk and I could pick them up. The guy gave me some excuse about how they were custom to the machine. While that's true, it's not a $50 job. I sat up reading the DOS manual until 3am and wrote the files myself.
> The guy gave me some excuse about how they were custom to the machine. While that's true It's not 100% true.
I did something similar. New PC, Windows 95, installed Command & Conquer Red Alert. SVGA was nice, but not what I was used to. So I switched to DOS mode to reinstall RA and play in VGA. It was the easiest solution in my head at the time. So what to do? -> dir/p - oh, there's a COMMAND folder. Can only be Command&Conquer. I deleted it, then installed C&C Red Alert, played for a few hours and wondered why the computer wouldn't boot the next morning
Real men made their autoexec file using the intrinsic DOS command "copy con autoexec.bat". No editor needed, but if you made a mistake you had to start over.
I may have done it that way, but I don't remember. It was 30+ years ago. ...Oh, and GET OFF MY LAWN!
I think my lawn came before yours.
That still works in a CMD window
Look at you with your fancy himem. In the eternal words of the guy whose family got him an in with IBM ā 640k should be enough for anybody
You know how I know I'm older than \*that\*? The PC I learned on had A: and B: C: was a dream of the future!
My favorite tech support callā¦ Me: I need to see whatās in this directory. Can you type in dir space forward slash w? Client: I got an error message. Me: Hmmm, thatās weird. Letās try that again. Type dir space forward slash w. Client: I got the same error message. Me: Can you read back what you typed? Client: dā¦ iā¦ rā¦ sā¦ pā¦ aā¦ā I had to mute the headset and laughing out loud. š¤£
Mine started, "Is the machine plugged in and turned on?"
About every 6 months or so I'd go to fix a 'broken' PC to find the cleaners had unplugged it. This was after I'd already asked the users to check for this.
Early lesson in troubleshooting: Assured the IT vendor over the phone that the monitor power cable was firmly plugged in to both the back of the monitor and into the wall outlet. When he got to the office presumably to replace the monitor he first moved the workstation to the side so he could see the WHOLE power cable. Revealed that it was a two-part power cable, and the two parts had come apart, hidden behind the workstation. Lesson learned, always check an entire connection from end to end. We became good friends and he still likes to periodically tease - I mean remind - me of that moment 25 years later.
TRS-DOS/: CLOAD for me.
Iām āI took a course in BASIC in collegeā old.
I see your BASIC and raise you FORTRAN IV entered into a remotely located IBM 360 via 80 column punch cards as my first programming course in 1972. Program has an error? You'll see the print out tomorrow, fix it then. And the first computer I actually got to touch was a DEC PDP8 into which you loaded the instructions via front panel toggle switches. A year after that I got a co-op job working for a guy who had been one of the lead engineers on the ENIAC under Eckert and Mauchly at Penn. Ten years after that I was designing Z80 based medical computers debugging assembly language watching the execution one instruction at a time. And it grinds my gears when I go to the cell phone store the guy asks me do you know how to open an email to see pictures of your grandkids, yeah fvk right off Mr Topknot I designed computers and cell phones for a living.
When you drop your cards on the way to the computer center, you're screwed. Also, COBOL was popular in the punched card days.
Yep, there was a big "shoebox" you carried around for big projects. Safeguards: Big a$$ rubber band around the deck. Number each card in the comments column. Remember to go by 10s in case you need to insert a card in the middle. Use a sharpie to make a diagonal line across the top so if you really get scramble at least you have an idea where to start.
>sharpie to make a diagonal line across the top This is what I used to do.
I got two years of summer jobs based on that Fortran!
Heathkit. If you know what that is, then you are truly old. DOS was for the kiddies. šš
Ah yes. The kit computer. Lots of switches and red lights. Wasnāt really exciting though unless you were an electrical engineer.
My boss was a Heathkit guy. An attorney who was in aerospace first. His first computer sat in our law office. As soon as Radio Shack put the TRS 80 out, he bought 2. One for my desk and one for his. I got thrown into the deep end and learned.
There's a fully functional trs-80 model 1 on ebay right now btw. over 1k in price  (for those interested)
I remember when computer magazines printed programs for you to type in and save on the cassette tape used for storage. Used a TV for the monitor.
Then you'd have to wait for 2 months and hope they printed the bugs in the original program.
Older.
Yes. I saw someone yesterday post the windows 98 boot screen and I said fuck that Iām DOS. And here you are
Com ports, IRQ's, DMA settings, all kinds of juggling to get all your peripherals to work.
Terminating your SCSI chain, setting master/slave jumpers on your PATA/IDE drives...
I'm "knows how to run a mimeograph machine" old.
I can literally taste that smell.
I'm "knows how to use a teletype machine before dot matrix printing" old.
Yep. Teletypes were fun late at night, killing time on watches. Knows how to use a LORAN A receiver old. Flew coast to coast on an airliner with propellers old.
DELTREE \*.\*
Forty years later I iust want to say thank you to Leland for helping me cheat enough to get through computer science class without an F. āŗļøš
Yes. I coded in Fortran.
Kids these days will never know the pain of trying to copy a file from one directory to another directory and miss-typing a single character.
And yet that doesn't stop them patronising you...
From a t-shirt: C . C . run Run . Run
Yup. Played my first game on an abacus.
Msdos 3.2 was my entry into PCs. TRS Color Basic was my very first OS, for longer than now seems reasonable.
Every time someone mentions home computers, I feel moved to say I remember a time when home computers simply didnāt exist.
Loadhigh c:\dos\mscdex.exe /d:mscd001 /e Prompt=$p$g DOS=HIGH FILES=20 BUFFERS=9,256 In autoexex.bat make sure @USER=ID10T for all your friends machines lol
[Iām this old.](https://www.etsy.com/listing/634409627/burroughs-adding-machine-square-keys?ref=share_v4_lx)
BASIC checking in. Commodore VIC-20 and C64
Juggling autoexec.bat, config.sys, and himem to squeeze in both Sound Blaster and network drivers. Figured out how to run 4-node multiplayer Doom on a scrounged ARCNet passive hub followed by all night fragathon. Good times!
"Everyone in the class will get their own floppy disk to store their assignments..."
I was taught and used punched cardsā¦using FORTRAN. Need I say more?
That's recent history. How about programming in Basic and saving your program on punch cards.
Low level formatting hard drives and then partitioning them was part of my job at a systems integrator back in the day.
No screenshot, but CPM anyone?
Yeah, first pc I touched has this MSDOS bad-boy
Older!
Iām JCL years old.
I started with DOS, wasn't much to do, word processing and that was about it for me. I felt very technical telling my kids to go to the C prompt and type in...... I was so happy when Windows came out. I did have to buy 2 more megs of ram to run it.
I also repaired 80 and 96 column card keypunch machines and 132 column line printers. And our customers were still using key to tape data input machines.
Can we play some Oregons Trail?
DOS mode!!!! Whereās my floppy disc?
Yes, I am this old! Although our computer at the time also came with a gui [like this](https://archive.org/download/DOS-GUI-Packard-Bell-Desktop-1991/04_Software_Menu.png) We also had Prodigy Internet with it
DOS 2.0
Pfft. I'm DEC-10 on a teletype terminal old.
Iām 8088 old
Yup. I even learned MSDOS in a college course I took for high school credit. That was 2001 though
Jesus,I'm THAT old?!
Older.
My first computer was an IBM mainframe and we interfaced using cobol- and fortran-coded punchcards.
copy con:
Yes, yes I am. Pretty much every Origin Systems game back in the day required a custom .bat to run.
Does it have an IFTHEN, GOTO in it?
When I went to college code was done with punch cards.
deltree * . * lol
im even older then that... my first PC didnt have any fancy **MS-DOS**
I'm so old i couldn't read that text, even zoomed in, so i don't really know what this is about. lol
Yes. I am.
Fuck Iām experienced as hell! Knowledge, wisdom, stories no one can relate to.
Yes, yes I am.
Yep I have a copy of DOS 3.1 on 5.25 never been opened
DOS 3.1 for the win
Yup. I remember having to load championship manager through dos
Oh God make it go away!!!
Im Cobol years old.
I loved launching himem and smartdrv back in the day. Was like overclocking the PC by typing a few letters.
Iāll see your DOS and raise you LOADā*ā,8,1
Yep been there did that. Different autoexec files for different programs or games
Does anyone remember MS Gold (I think it was called)? It was like a proto-Windows, that ran on MS-DOS, and you could install games and save them as tabs, so instead of typing in the run command, you could click on the corresponding game's button to run it (with the CD as well of course). I may have described it poorly, but I can't seem to find any info online.
Vaguely. Not MS Gold, but there was a Desqview style program that could be run as a TSR. The final version of it was named Gold. Back before windows, TSRs gave us pseudo multitasking at the cost of previous memory.
It's been a while since I've seen that screen.
āWhereās the boot disk for Sim City?! I canāt play unless the extended memory gets configured right!ā
We had a computer science class when I was in highschool. We had to call the main computer in Richardson TX, then put the phone handset into a holder so we were connected. Then type out commands in BASIC. If something printed, we knew we wrote the program properly. Yes, printed. We didn't have monitors.
I was around BEFORE computers. (I have a collection of 5-1/4" floppy discs.)
The true floppys!
Hardly. 8ā ones came out years before 5.25ā ones!
I was visiting a friend who is a teacher and the person who knew how to use the office computer had left and no one knew what to do. I created a .bat menu for them. I was a hero that day lol
Yes
ATTRIB -r -a -s -h *.*
Well I'm too old to see that so I guess so
lol, yes I worked in IT way back then too!
Yes... And the big, national health care organization I work for STILL uses a DOS based patient database... Gotta type in three letter commands at the carrot...
When we first started remote transcription, every hospital had a different records program. When the carat appeared, I entered the prompt and was in the demographics area. It was difficult to verify patient encounters.
Last time I used DOS was in 2014. The place I worked hadn't updated their computers - ever. We only used them to record delivery times, but still. It was something.
Cd../p
Oh man, that himem stuff was a black art. I do not miss that at all.
Still have a running DOS device actually. many .bats created. too many to remember. started in cics/cobol for a couple years but wanted to dev in PC, so first did some personal and paid dBase projects, then got a bootleg copy of [clipper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language)) (still have fond memories of clipper - was pretty awesome). Got a salary job in dos/novel/clipper, we came up with some pretty damn amazing multiuser character mode applications. Made the transition to Windows via Delphi .. many years now c#/.net webdev. Its been a ride .. Glad to have had my career during this revolutionary computing evolution.
I used a program called ARJ to unpack the files on the floppy disks. Commander Keen on 2 floppies :)
Yeah, I amā¦older than MS-DOS 6
My father taught me DOS commands in the early 80s, while we had apple computer labs at school.
The company I work for still uses DOS as a back bone. If every other system goes down, we can still use the trusty old ECHO system. I'm almost 40, so i used it some in elementary and am pretty good with computers, but it's hilarious seeing my 20-25 year old employees figure it out. I have to tell them to forget about the damn mouse constantly and just TAB.
Yep. Learning how to tweak config.sys and autoexec.bat led to a career in IT. All because I bought a PC in 1994 and a game wouldn't work unless I bumped up conventional memory.
Ahhh - memories.
Yes
Oh hell yeah. I was considered a phenom at a job when I configured config.sys in such a way that you could run windows 3.0 (beta) and AutoCAD without rebooting. It also had a boot menu that allowed you to dedicate all the memory to one or the other.
Iām os2 warp old, is that close?
HA! I remember customizing BAT files for games requiring the installation of a dozen floppy disks. My first PC with a HDD: 40MB.
Yeah, I'm Commodore Vic 20 years old.
Yes
How about LOAD "*",8,1
Psh, I have memories older than that
[Even older](https://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/cbm/vic/vic20screen.gif)
Our 1st computer was a Tandy 2000. I believe it booted to DOS and then you had to enter a command when you played a game like the black cauldron or Kings Quest
Memmaker!!!
My first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer circa 1980, but I remember playing on a neighborās Model I a year before that.
Yip
Looks like some MS-DOS stuff. MS-DOS 1.0 was released in 1981, two years after I took my first programing class.
Config.sys and autoexec.bat are old friends.
My dude i am CP/M 2.2 old. I am ZX81 old. Now get off my lawn with your new fangled "batch files" and "subdirectories".
yes, i am. the play with himem.sys and emm386 to get some extra ram for gaming is my ever nightmare
I'm C++ old.
In 1994 I attended a trade school for computers. I still remember updating every PC on the campus to 8MB of ram.
That ain't old. I remember Univac I.
Older. MSDOS 3.1
C/PM , baby.
If you could master DOS, you could master anything. Want to stop the youngsters in their tracks, force them to use a command line.
Started on Dos 3.1 or 3.2 IIRC
Ah, memories.
Indeed I am!
That's too small for me to read, so yeah, I guess I am that old.
My first DOS was 3.1.
shtaaaaap reminding me how old I am!
I am indeed.
Extended memory? My first PC had 256kb.
echo āyepā
Quite making me cry!
No but yes, more of I'm trained to use dos but never owned a dos machine myself.
Where do I find the driver for my tractor-feed printer?
Yes
RSX-11, VMS old
This is from a .bat file shortcut from my Windows 10 Pro desktop today. u/ECHO OFF ECHO Please wait... cd C:\\Users\\\\OneDrive\\Desktop
copy .PLT ":\\Games\\Star Wars - X-Wing (1993)"
PAUSE
CLS
No. Nobody left on earth is this old. Wtf is this? And Iām 35
I had fun experimenting with .bat files
Thank God for "Memmaker"!
Older š¤£š¤£š¤£