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The fairly young guys will probably not identify with my fortune cookie fortune today. I know most kids won't but those of us that used DOS should.

"Fortune Not Found: Abort, Retry, Ignore?"



My first DOS PC came with an instruction manual and it's depth went very little beyond how to find the on switch and how to operate same...

Before I got an actual DOS manual (3.1 I think, hey, they were scarce) I was the very image of the guy banging his head on the keyboard. I didn't know another soul on the planet to talk to for help. Absolutely nobody I knew owned a computer or wanted one. Ask on the Internet? What internet? My wife still tells of me disappearing into the office for hours and hours and her hearing nothing but me yelling at the computer... Calling it names...




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robinson46176 wrote:The fairly young guys will probably not identify with my fortune cookie fortune today. I know most kids won't but those of us that used DOS should.

"Fortune Not Found: Abort, Retry, Ignore?"



My first DOS PC came with an instruction manual and it's depth went very little beyond how to find the on switch and how to operate same...

Before I got an actual DOS manual (3.1 I think, hey, they were scarce) I was the very image of the guy banging his head on the keyboard. I didn't know another soul on the planet to talk to for help. Absolutely nobody I knew owned a computer or wanted one. Ask on the Internet? What internet? My wife still tells of me disappearing into the office for hours and hours and her hearing nothing but me yelling at the computer... Calling it names...




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I still speak in fowl terms to my computer. The only difference is that there is no DOS.

Actually, I got very good with DOS, Wordperfect and the CPM OS. I still have a box full of software that runs on CPM and with DOS. Don't know why but I do. I think it might be valuable some day.

Oh, those were the good old day without Windows. Actually, folks who knew what they were doing or at least had a clue could operate those machines. Folks with Windows (which I have) don't have to think about how to get it done. Remember A:\dir or C:\dir? Remember Edlin? Remember getting a C: drive? And, 10meg was a humungous hard drive. You could store lots of spreadsheets and word processing documents on there. Simple office programs such as: Multimate, Enable, All-In-One, dBase11, WordPerfect, and I just had a brain freeze.

Yes, I remember DOS 3.1 but really loved version 5. Could make menus and set the prompt to say something like C:\Where do you want to go?_ on someone's computer and they wondered how that got there. Now, you can browse the internet with Kindle, Nook, iPad and Droid phones. Amazing!

Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

Ten Meg of memory was an upgrade! When I built my first computer it was 8086 based and had 64K of memory. The 8" floppy was a real monster. Then there was C:\delete or was it C:\erase.

The very first computer that I worked on was manufactured by Burroughs and had all of its bi-mag memory in one equipment cabinet and the memory drums in another.

Dusty, you guys remember that with much more fondness than I. I know you guys enjoyed it and were good at it and I salute you all, but for my money, I'll take my " canned" applications and run. I have had Macs for years and the idea that they did well was make it as simple as possible for me, I like simple.

The first computer I worked with ran on 3-Phase electricity, had 128K (that's not meg) of memory, had 150MB of disk space, we ran a university for 5000 students, and cost over $300,000. The head actuators for the disk drives were hydraulic (yeah, oil) and made by Cessna. The first PC had a 4K motherboard (DOS 1.0). A 128K upgrade was in excess of $3,000. The first 300bps modem I had to deal with cost over $500.

Good old days?.....naaaaah....just the dark ages of computing.

My first home computer was a kit, Sinclair 1000. It was called that because it had 1000 bits of memory (that's bits, not kilobytes, not megabytes) It had a membrane keyboard, connected to the TV for a monitor and used a cassette player for long-term memory storage. I wonder what it would be worth today?

My first "real" computer was a Commodore 64 which I bought brand new at JC Penneys for (I think) about $700 back when that much money represented a few months salary. I eventually sold it with a bunch of accessories and software at a garage sale in the late '90s for about $25 I think.

I've also owned and used 8" floppy drives (Radio Shack), before the 5" and 3-1/4" floppys. My first experience with a big computer was at the University of Arkansas when that had a big mainframe IBM in it's own environmentally controlled room. I spent the summer debugging a Fortran IV program on punch cards. When I went to college at Harding University they had a DEC PDP11 mainframe, state-of-the-art, with those big stacks of hard drives, etc. What was cool was that they had remote terminals in rooms in other buildings!! with keyboards and green screens!!!!!! and you could program in Basic.

Good grief, now i feel really, really old........

And the 'manuals' for early(pre 3.x) Dos included technical reference info as to how dos and the hardware communicated. Each succeeding version of Dos became more 'of a secret'.

Timex-Sinclair today:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p4634.m570.l1313&_nkw=timex+sinclair&_sacat=See-All-Categories


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My first computer had no hard drive or floppy and 16K of memory that eventually got upgraded to 64K and I added floppy disks from a Cannon typewriter/word processor that I got surplus. I wrote a lot of my own software.

My phone is several hundred thousand times more faster and more capable. On my hone computer I have about nine terabytes of disk space mostly used for backups.

Where I work we do not consider disk space less than a terabyte significant.