Microsoft's MS-DOS is 30 today

The Register ^ | 27 July 2011 | Tony Smith

[TSgt]

COPY CON hb.txt
Happy Birthday MS-DOS
CTRL+Z

Man I’ve spent a serious amount of my life looking at that flashing cursor.

[starlifter]

I saw this on the interwebs so it must be true!

[ken in texas]

When I started coding, we had to code in 0s and 1s, and sometimes we didn't even have the 1s.

I realized that hard drives stored 0s and 1s. If 0 is nothing, why even bother? Now all my hard drives just keep track of how many 1s are written. They're a lot faster now. /grin

[cynwoody]

Command line admins are expensive. GUI admins are cheap.

I thought the whole point of GUIs was, you didn't need no stinkin' admin.

Seriously, to admin efficiently, you need copious automation. A GUI layer on top of the automation is fine and dandy. But the admin needs to understand the automation, so he can can cope when it breaks and upgrade it to meet changing needs. Such admins are not cheap.

[cynwoody]

Did that old relic in your first screen shot understand date /t and time /t?

[Colonial35]

xcopy32 /s

i liked pc dos better.

[Moonman62]

I still say OS2/Warp was the best PC operating system, ever.

And MS came out with a minor bug fix that just by coincidence prevented Windows from running on Warp.

[Moonman62]

As smart as Bill Gates is there was a tremendous amount of luck and coincidences that led to the huge success of Microsoft.

[ShadowAce]

I always thought him a better businessman than a techie.

[Moonman62]

And Microsoft always had better strategy and marketing than products.

[driftdiver]

No, your engineers need to understand whats happening in the background. Admins need to know what button to push.

[MayflowerMadam]

...sigh... I miss DOS. Love the C Prompt.

[w1andsodidwe]

First computer I ever used was the Imsai 8080 in 1976. With those red and blue switches. What fun.

[Still Thinking]

I loved programming machine language by flipping the switches on the front - writing actual code is for sissies.

You had switches? We would have killed for switches! We had to program with test leads jumpered between sockets, using coat hangers or bodily appendages when we ran out of leads. Softy!

[GreenLanternCorps]

C:\

[cynwoody]

VMS is my nominee as the best OS of all time. Too bad
you need VAX or Alpha processors to run it.

In 1988, Mr. Bill hired Dave Cutler, who lead the development of VMS, to head the group developing Windows NT, the ancestor of all modern versions of Windows. Windows has an internal API, separate from the published Win32 API, which is said to resemble that of VMS.

[raybbr]

Cool. I just had to load an interface for an old Telemecanique PLC. Everything had to be loaded and run through DOS. We have an old Satellite laptop for this.

For the first hour I couldn't understand why, in DOS, whenever I typed the "/" key I would get another character. It was happening all over the the keyboard.

Took me a while to decide to open 'autoexec.bat' and find this little command: "Keybd FR". What? Someone set the keyboard in DOS to French?

The interesting part was how easily the DOS commands came back to me.

It was actually quite fun.

[markman46]

hey the old Commodore 64 program load