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That's not an infinity symbol, that's:

A bow tie.
A dead cartoon character's eyes.
A dumbbell.

∞

Show-off.

In my day, we didn't have these fancy-schmancy high-ASCII characters, We had what was on the keyboard, and we made do.

You kids today with your umlauts and your copyrights and your fractions-squeezed-into-one-character...bah!

*wanders off, muttering to self*

And you are how old?

If we're going to start stories of the beginning of the computer revolution, a lot of bad feelings will result. I remember DOS. I remember Applie IIe's, when programs ran right off of floppies (and a megabyte was a LOT of memory) and games were about gameplay, not graphics. Oh, those were the days...

I remember when I was five or six, my mum was programming on the Commodore 64. CASSETTE TAPES, DUDE, CASSETTE TAPES!

When I was just a little older, I was programming on my C64. God, I loved that machine. (It's no coincidence that I chose Commodore as my "rank.")

Just as a thought, does this mean that Alec Guinness will be making a guest appearance?

Well, I can't claim any usage of the C64, but I still get warm fuzzies about the Apple IIe. That was the way to go. Programs on floppies. They ran right off the disk, and if the disk got corrupted, throw it out and take out another one.

Cassette tapes? Hopefully you don't mean audio tapes.

Quick poll. How many DOS commands can everyone rattle off the tops of their heads?

Probably not. Maybe Ed Wood, though.

One. Which is strange, given that I used to play the likes of Theme Park, Civ and Monkey Island through DOS (though Civ was a CD-ROM re-release, so I don't think I get any cred for that really).

Okay, let's see...

cd
cd\
dir
dir/w

I guess that's it.

Without looking things up...

md
rd
dir
edit
type
deltree
echo
del
format
fdisk

And, of course...

win

That'd be pretty much 95% of everything I ever did under DOS and via DOS shell in Windows. (Of course, I remember a hell of a lot of options and tricks for those, too, but I felt it would be cheating to list them all seperately.)

Gatac

> C/
> C/windows
> C/windows/run
> Run/dammit/run

I still use DOS. Or at least I use "Command Prompt" on my Windows computers. 'dir' and 'cd' are the main ones I use from the command shell. And I use the command prompt all the time on my linux computers.

Gatac's list is good, but there's a great DOS command he didn't list: 'rem.' It's 'echo' without the output! Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty rem:

c:\> rem
c:\> rem help
c:\> rem quit
c:\> rem exit
c:\> rem bye
c:\> rem hello?
c:\> rem eat flaming death
c:\> rem ^C
c:\> rem ^C
c:\> rem ^D
c:\> rem

---
Note the consistent command flags and error reportage. Rem is
generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm
the novice with verbosity.

(Okay, I started borrowing from The Ed man joke page at the end there.)

On our family's DOS computers, a 386 and later a 486, I actually didn't use the built-in commands a lot because I made my own .bat files. k was Commander Keen, j was Jill of the Jungle, and so on. It was also on those computers that I learned how to program in C. My crowning achievement was a simple Windows facsimile I made from scratch -- it couldn't do much, but it had graphical icons for starting programs. I called it WinDOS.

I still use the Command Prompt for one important thing: a program I wrote years ago called 5mv.exe. It takes a fiver and formats it for HTML. (By the way, I've found out there are two command prompts available from the Run dialog box: "command" and "cmd". The latter is the one you want, as it has more features.)

DOS for the win?

Jill of the Jungle! Awesome! You have to love those, especially when they (the Epic people) made fun of the Apogee heroes and called Commander Keen "yesterday's news."

Okay, so I knew about win, format, and fdisk too.

And DuckTales, too.

Then again, we had some good times on the Commodore 64, too...ah, Turrican.

Gatac

Ducktales? Great show, but I found the game weird. Using a wooden cane as a pogo stick? Bouncing on rocks to turn them into gemstones?