+++ HERE +++ is a fun article to read. The article is a reprint of a 2017 article where the author decides to work using a DOS computer operating system for a day.

Needless to say there are some trials and tribulations. There are also many references to dusty software titles that use to be business mainstays.

Those of you that lived through those days of yore will get a smile from the effort.

Hi, Jim -

I have an MS-DOS 6.22 virtual machine on my computer and occasionally run it and play with some of the old apps. More for just nostalgia than anything, but it's fun to reminisce. Before the demise of floppy discs, I converted them all to disc image files (which both VMWare Player and VirtualBox can read, so installing the programs is pretty easy. None of my discs are copy-protected, so no issues there. Just for fun.

This might have been an alternate method for me to solve a problem I had recently. An interface to a database I had written 30 years ago in Turbo Pascal had to be revisited. Of course none of it ran in Windows 10. I recompiled the pascal after finding an emulator, but it might have been easier to use DOS again.

I remember the joy when DOS 3.1 came out.... and writing batch files to make things easier.....

I taught batch file programming, of course, and you could automate a lot. I remember an early program that compiled batch files into EXE files. It was called Son of a Batch. That caught the attention of the dean of business.

My first computer ran DOS version 4 or 5, which was fairly quickly replaced by a machine running Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.x (I think). I was a kid then so I pretty much only used DOS for games, although once I figured out how to write batch files and use the echo command I found out that I could effectively "animate" some things with ASCII characters.

There was a time where I was actually trying to track down an old DOS machine so I could use Adlib Tracker on a real OPL3 chip, but now I just use DosBox since it's good enough.

Man, that's taking me back!!! Let's see how much I remember. First you had to run FDISK. Then with the DOS disc in the drive you ran FORMAT C: /s for system and /U for unconditional. That would allow you to get a C:\ prompt when you booted.

I think I remember that as I installed programs on my own PC (Let's use Telix as the example) I would note the executable and make a batch file in a folder called C:\batch that was just c:\telix\telix.exe and from the C:\ prompt I could just run telix.bat, and that I had to put c:\batch in the file path.

I worked at a job a few months before Christmas building the most barebones computers you can imagine. Pop in a motherboard, connect all the pigtails, pop in a CPU, some RAM, a hard drive, install DOS and put it on a shelf. 2 of us did it assembly line style. If I recall I did the mobo, the CPU, the RAM and the hard drive, and the other guy did the connections and the DOS install. We were building like 4 an hour on a slow day. Sheer repetition and battery powered Black and Decker screwdrivers makes you fast! I had two of them. One had a screwdriver bit an the other had a hex socket for the standoffs on the motherboard. Compared to 2021, the computers were the biggest piles of crap I ever saw. The cheapest everything the owner could buy. There was a warehouse guy who sent orders out, received parts, and unboxed the cases and stacked them on a skid. We had those cheap PCs EVERYWHERE. Christmas was over, and after the anticipated big sales rush never came, I'd guess when he must have had at least 400 of those things on shelves. And of course, on Dec 26th we were both laid off. Furloughed. Essentially fired. We were working for a dollar above minimum wage so we didn't care. Plus the guy was a jerk.

What a gig. We sat at a bench and blasted music all day while serving as essentially human robots on an assembly line. I remember watching a guy who wanted a job there try to put the RAM in the IDE sockets. Fun times. Building boat anchors! Gigging most nights, building cheap PCs during the day. What a life.

By the way, if you run the actual MS-DOS in a virtual machine under Windows (versus something like FreeDOS, which is an emulated DOS), you need to download and install a little utility called DOSIDLE, otherwise your CPU will run at 100% when you run the VM.

If only I remembered how to install Virtual Box VM. I get to a certain place and don't remember what to do, and the directions are very cloudy. I haven't installed that in over 15 years. Maybe I'll ship you the computer I want it on and you can do it!