what is DOS?

[shorthair]

Okay....this may initially seem a REALLY stupid question.  Really what I'm asking is: how the hell do you use it?  If I go to run and type 'cmd', I get C:documents and settings: .  And then anything I type in there always says not recognised, etc. If I type 'command', I get C: some weird ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- DOCUME~ ....something like that. Anything typed in there always results in bad batch file command or something equally bizarre.  I can't run command line mame if my life depended on it.

So, how does it work?...please.

[Spaz Monkey]

cd lets you change directories/folders

[NickG]

there is a nice guide on mameworld (link)
that should get you started.
there are quite a few more guides around the web as well

[BobA]

Here is another link for you

http://www.computerhope.com/msdos.htm

[Circo]

I never felt old until right now.......no offense.  

[shorthair]

Hahahah, I'm not that young, just that I stayed away from comuputers till they were more friendly....as a kid, I always thought it looked very tedious to have to type in commands.  Anyways, the reason I've been trying command line is cos I want to try out powerstrip.  I did as the tutorial said - note: the 'cd' in a post above is what did the trick...thanks! - and though I only ran 720, I couldn't tell if it invoked the resolution through powerstrip.  I'm using the newer version, so don't know if that has any effect on the operations per results.  Thanks, all.

[Extreme8]

I never felt old until right now.......no offense.   

I felt almost the same way when I read the title of this post, except I've felt old for a long time.
I was working in the IT field when we had a staff meeting to announce that "IBM is getting into the personal computer buisiness" although I don't remember seeing anything before DOS 2.0

Kids.

[Tiger-Heli]

I never felt old until right now.......no offense.  

Agreed! 

[BobbyG66]

Does anyone remember buying a can of oil and then having to stick a spout in it?

[Hoopz]

Does anyone remember buying a can of oil and then having to stick a spout in it?

What version of DOS was that??? 

Sorry, couldn't resist.

[youki]

Do you remember CPM/80  ?

It is from that OS that comes the Famous   A:>    of DOS.    DOS 1.0 was simply of kind of port of CPM/80 (what was for Z80 processor)  to 8086/88 processor. 

The first PC i owned had  DOS 2.11 .  ... i'm feeling very old too... 

[jcrouse]

My first PC I actually owned was an 8088 running DOS. I remember buying a mouse on the way home. I set it all up and then had to install the mouse software, of course, a floppy. I opened the manual, started to read and saw that infamous word which will stick in my memory forever, "autoexec.bat". I couldn't even pronounce it. I immediately called a friend of mine who had a pc and told him to get the #$%^ over here and give me a hand. WOW, the good ole days of autoexec.bat and config.sys, when I actually felt like I had control of something.

John

[shorthair]

Does anyone remember buying a can of oil and then having to stick a spout in it?

Ah, that ain't that old.  They still did that through the late 70s....of which, with regard to mice, I would go to my dad's work with him on saturday sometimes, and I remember there being no mice around...and the keyboard an monitor were one piece!

[youki]

Speaking of mice ,  do you remember Light Pen?

Here in France we had very popular set of computer (Thomson TO7, MO5, MO6 etc...) that were provided with a Light Pen in standard. That what was fun to draw directly on the screen on painting software. And point menu item directly.  A kind of ancestor of touch screen.

[loadman]

I never felt old until right now.......no offense.  

AmigaDos    Not so old

[shorthair]

Speaking of mice ,  do you remember Light Pen?

Here in France we had very popular set of computer (Thomson TO7, MO5, MO6 etc...) that were provided with a Light Pen in standard. That what was fun to draw directly on the screen on painting software. And point menu item directly.  A kind of ancestor of touch screen.

I thought the light pen on my Vectrex was, like, a new thing.

[youki]

I had a Light Pen even on my Commodore 64. That was a relatvily commun device at that time.

[alexandro98]

Earliest experience with Dos was either 3.1 or 3.3 on a 3.5 inch floppy in A: drive and wordperfect in B: drive.   Jeez, dos was the bomb, remember doing copycon directly into a .bat file and doing it perfectly with out any typos, now that was fun!

C:\Dos
C:\Dos\Run
Run\Dos\Run

 

[Organic Jerk]

man..  "What is DOS?"


That title hits you like a ton of bricks.. 

[Crax]

My first PC I actually owned was an 8088 running DOS.

John

You and your fancy 8088.  The first one at our house was an IBM PC Jr.  which we later added a card to it that you could flip a switch on the back between PC jr mode and PC mode.  But hey, it played King's Quest 1 great along with ton's of other great games like Battle Chess back in the day.......

[shorthair]

man..  "What is DOS?"


That title hits you like a ton of bricks.. 

Yeah, it got the attention, and the promptness of an answer, I wanted. I still don't really know how to use it...or, to get to it...I accurately would've said something about command line function, but that title is what came to mind.

[AlexKidd]

I use to get into debates with a friend of mine over calling the windows command line "DOS". I guess in windows9X it was still DOS, but with anything newer it's just a command line interface that shares many of the DOS commands. Although most tech people will still know what you mean if you call it DOS, you won't be scoring any respect points. 

[Organic Jerk]

Yeah, it got the attention, and the promptness of an answer, I wanted. I still don't really know how to use it...or, to get to it...I accurately would've said something about command line function, but that title is what came to mind.

It's all good... I'm just being facetious

 

[shorthair]

Actually, someone the other day (don't remember where) told me something like 'command line isn't DOS'.  I thought, 'okay...I wouldn't know, so I can only imagine'.

[Tiger-Heli]

Actually, someone the other day (don't remember where) told me something like 'command line isn't DOS'.  I thought, 'okay...I wouldn't know, so I can only imagine'.

You are probably thinking of MAME.

Prior to R37B15, there was DOS MAME or MAME32.  After that build, there was MAMEW or MAME32.

DOS MAME ran under DOS, but since Windows emulates DOS it worked fine.

MAMEW works just like DOSMAME, except I don't think it will work under a pure DOS (no windows) system anymore.

[shorthair]

I dunno, but without the right tutelage, it's a briar patch to me.

[modessitt]

Sorta getting off topic, so let's try this....

Depending on your computer the only way to get into DOS is to either select "command prompt" from your accessories menu, or to have it boot in safe mode to command prompt.  The only problem with this is that it isn't really DOS, just a "window" into DOS.  The reason it won't let you move around freely and denies you access to a lot of things is because those things are being utilized by Windows which is still running.  Wouldn't want you to try to delete something it's using, now.

The easiest way to use DOS is to create a floppy (anyone still have one?) or maybe a burned CD that will boot your system directly to DOS without loading windows.  Then get into your system setup (usually by hitting DEL at initial boot screen) and change your boot order to have whichever drive (floppy or CD) as a first check, before going on to your hard drive.  This will allow you to get in DOS unfettered by Windows.

The DOS boot disc is very useful for two reason:

1.  You have a virus or spyware program that your software can identify, but can't delete because it's "in use" or has "access denied."  It auto-runs when windows boot and you can't delete it while windows is up.  Although HijackThis is a great program for getting rid of these, sometimes you just need to find it's location, go into DOS and delete it.

2.  Sometimes your system will get so screwed up that you can't get windows to even boot.  Not even in safe mode!  (Blue Screen of Death)  Sometimes you're only option is to reformat your hard drive and reinstall windows.  But what about that thesis paper you've spent the last 6 months on?  That big report for work?  The high scores file for your mame?  With a DOS boot disc, you can get into your file structure, copy your files to writeable media, and have them ready to put back once your format is complete.

Sometimes it helps to remember how to use these things long before Windows came out.

[Kaytrim]

The easiest way to use DOS is to create a floppy (anyone still have one?)

What size? 3.5, 5.25 or 12 inch or would you rather have tape?   Better yet how about a stack of punch cards.

[loadman]

A nice Fire Starter?

[shorthair]

My dad has a 12 incher in a case at home in the car port.  Back when I was in high school, he brought home one that was almost three (3) feet across!

[bfauska]

That sounds dirtier than it should, I'm sure.

[Banacek]

Remember having to park that 2 Meg hard drive before you could shut down the computer? Good times...

[johnm160]

God I am old   

Yep I remember parking hard drive heads

I remember partitioning my new 40 meg hard drive because dos would only recognize a 32 meg partition.

[bfauska]

wow, park... I had totally forgoten about that.

I know that windows 3.1 seemed like the devil.  "what do you mean I can't see what's going on when I tell it to do something, I need text."

[shorthair]

That sounds dirtier than it should, I'm sure.

You're a bad man.

[Extreme8]

any of you children remember

debug = g800:5    ?

The low level format routine for a Western Digital st225 (20 meg) drive on a WD controller


one of my first hard drive installs was a Corvus Constillation 5MB drive shared between (up to) 128 apple IIe's

Yep, I'm as old as dirt.

[bfauska]

Not that old.


Here's a fun game...

MY first computer (after the C64) was a 286 16mhz w/ 2mb ram and a 40mb hdd.

You?

[Extreme8]

TI 99/4a, then the jump to the apple II+, and finally the big iron,
the 8 mhz 286 (turbo mode pushed it to 12 mhz), 512k ram, 20 meg drive with a 360K floppy.
I did have one of those fancy Hercules graphics cards that allowed me to see 16 different patterns of green on my monochrome monitor though.

[Extreme8]

What?
nobody is going to chime in with the stone tablet or abacus that they used in high school?

See, I am older than the hills. I graduated high school in 1981.

Actually I learned to program on a teletype in high school, no video display, each line was printed on a piece of paper like a type writer. The program was saved on a punched paper tape - sort of like a tickertape.
Once we finished that class we were able to move on and program with hollerith (punch) cards.
The program was entered by physically rewiring the computer and data was input with the cards.

Yes, I do remember the days of "what the heck is this Microsoft stuff"? back in a time when Bill Gates and myself both earned the same annual salary.

[youki]

back in a time when Bill Gates and myself both earned the same annual salary.

lol!!!!   

Do you remember when Bill Gaste's vision for the future was standirized computer and with few others he launched the MSX Standard?

I made my very first program on a TI 57  :



And my first program in BASIC language on a Sharp PC1213 , the machine had an very huge memory capacity of 0.5k ... (512 Bytes) .
And at this time we could do very cool thing with only 0.5k!!

i made my first graphic video game on a ZX81 with 1k Ram . (1024bytes)...

then i add  a C64   and in the same time, i had a PC compatible 8088 4.77MHZ (with turbo to swtich to 10Mhz), 640k RAM , HS 5 MEga , and CGA card., Dos 2.11

At this time i did not understand why the PC was so expensive and had so ugly games in comparison with my C64 , 10 time less expensive!!!