What are your favorite memories with MS DOS?

[Hellbent]

My dad used to hide the 5 1/4" floppy game disks so I wouldn't play too much. I remember finding those big floppy disks in the filing cabinet and fumbling around trying to understand how to run the games on it (I must have watched him loading the games enough times to remember commands like 'dir'). I remember finally figuring out that most files wouldn't run the games and that the ones I wanted to look out for were .bat, .exe, and .com files. Getting the games to run on my own when my parents weren't around was pretty exciting.

 

The games I'd play from those big floppy disks were Pango (kick bricks to squash the bees), Paratroopers (gun down the incoming paratroopers with your stationary cannon), Bouncing Babies (save the babies jumping out of the burning building by bouncing them along the jump-catch things and bouncing them into the ambulance), QBert (pyramid game where you had to hit all the tiles on the pyramid without getting got by the snakes), and there was a Pacman type game the name of which I do not recall that sometimes would load with clean chromatic ascii graphics and other times a jumbled mess of ascii ugliness, and I could never figure out why the game would only sometimes load right. More games from those earliest days of DOS were the side scrollers Light Cycles (where you had to dock your plane with a blimp), Aldo's Adventures (was the original iteration of that game called that? (In relatively recent times of nostalgia I found an updated, color version of this game online) which had a super challenging level called "Outer Limits" where you had to jump onto a teeny little dot in order to complete the level; my dad and brother liked this game more than me and were much better at it than me. Finally, a chromatic first person perspective Ford "simulation" racing game that graded your racing performance. I remember finally getting "perfect" runs in that game.

 

A little later on there was a game called Beast which was quite fun and interesting; the graphics were very simple though; H's were the beasts and tougher beasts were made with the double ascii lines to make bigger super beasts. You had to push bricks around and squash the H's and their eggs. But if you trapped them in the bricks instead of squashing them weird stuff would happen! (they'd continue to speed up until finally they'd explode into more beasts). When I first played the game, probably on our family's 8086 or 286 machine it didn't have color). Really quite a great game.

 

 

I remember learning some basics of the program Basic, how you could change colors and you could make your own PC Speaker sounds and music. Later it was cool learning how to make my own batch files. Several years later (in the great year of 1994) I remember creating a batch file (win.bat) on the school computers, early in my freshman year of high school that went something like this:

 

@echo off

cd\windows

ren win.com to win

echo Windows has been deleted.

 

Yeah, the school's computer teacher was real happy about that. (He had no idea what I had done, or why the computer wouldn't boot Windows 3.1 from MS DOS, but instead showed the message "Windows has been deleted"). I didn't get in trouble for it, though, which is quite surprising in retrospect. I just renamed the file back to win.com and ran it and he was satisfied and told me never to do that again.

 

In my senior year I took some kind of independent study / build computers class and towards the end of the class, the teacher was out for the day and we were entrusted to do our work alone, so (duh) I led the other students in installing Doom on all the machines so we could deathmatch but I don't remember actually deathmatching (did we run out of time?). I got in more trouble for that stunt than the "Windows has been deleted" one but it amounted to just a lecture on how disappointed he was, that he expected more of us--to be more responsible and mature.

 

A little later on from the earliest MS DOS days of my childhood there was the first person perspective LHX Attack Chopper mission based game that took my brother and I awhile to figure out (for instance, what are bogies?) and there was Accolade's Test Drive 3. That game had a complicated paper passcode wheel with three wheels that spun in both directions that you had to line up codes in order to enter the password to play the game. Figuring out that codewheel was always so daunting and out of my depth, so there was such a sense of "woohoo!" and accomplishment when I finally did (normally I had to get my older brother to do it since I couldn't figure it out). That game was a big step up from the monocrhome and CGA graphics games up to that point (Interestingly those early games looked better in gold monochrome than 4 color cyan/purple CGA). The exploratory nature of that game was super fun, you could go offroad and find "tractor paths" that were shortcuts. You could even find a barn with chickens in it! It was also neat that at the very end of the game in addition to getting rain you got snow! and all the grass turned white. 

 

Around this same time was the super fun puzzle adventure game Willy Beamish. Another fun game to explore; I remember racing frogs and how fun it was to try to figure out how to get tickets for the ferry.

 

 

Then came games like Jill of the Jungle and of course Commander Keen 1 and 4; I remember we got computer speakers and how cool it was to get Adlib or Soundblaster sound and real music instead of just sounds created from sophisticated beeps from the PC Speaker. I have fond memories also of playing Ironman's Offroad. The rich, vibrant VGA color graphics were so captivating and comforting (in a very similar way to how Wolf3D's vibrant VGA colors were). It was so cool making it to the later tracks, particularly the final two tracks: the openness of track 7 with the big rut walls that didn't keep you on the track like the normal walls of the earlier tracks did, so you could easily fly off the track and lose huge time trying to get back on, but when you managed to stay within the rut walls it was super satisfying; and then finally making it to the final track Cliffhanger which was so bizarre because it didn't have any walls at all! It just had round posts that you had to go around. The complete openness of that track blew my mind the first time I saw it; so cool and uniquely different to all the other tracks! which were all fully enclosed by walls (except track 7) up to that point. I'd always lose the game shortly after reaching that track, though, but there was always that "wow, I made it to the end of the game to this weird, abstractly open, final track!" and it was super satisfying to figure out the right way to go and to stay on the track and not fall off the cliffs to the lower parts of the track (good luck getting around the post in the right direction after that happened). 

 

Warcraft II was another big step in gaming for me; totally new kind of game. At first I thought it was boring with the slow training and building of things, but I soon fell in love with its abundant charm and mission oriented warfare.

 

Later in life, how the dots would stop at 4 for awhile when loading Doom and then eventually would start crawling forward again. Getting my own Dell Pentium 100c computer in high school was super exciting as now I had a proper machine to run Doom on.

 

 

[Chopkinsca]

Considering I hade a DOS only computer up until around 2000, I have a lot of random memories from it.

 

I self-learned BASIC from a book. I still have my shitty text-based dungeon crawler named... dungeon. I also remember making a batch file so my sister just had to type in 'cat' to play Catacomb 2.

 

Maybe it's worth noting the computer was born in the mid 80's, so it couldn't do much in the way of games.

[Murdoch]

Many, but my earliest and funniest was the first time i used it. I was 11, maybe 12, and the school's computers booted into a primative GUI called HDM - Hard Disk Menu. There was an exit to DOS option that was password protected. The password was dos. I felt satisfaction for figuring it out but also slightly insulted. Like give us some credit teachers and not make it so stupidly simple?

 

The other computer it was the last name of the teacher who used it most. On there i found the teacher's dirty games stash. I don't remember precisely what it was. It wasn't too graphic, monochromatic graphics after all, but plainly not intended for children. The teacher said "you shouldn't have been in there" to which i shot back "well you shouldn't have had them there". There that conversation ended. They couldn't exactly get me in trouble or they would have been screwed lol.

[P41R47]

i had a dos pc from 1992 up to 2001, and then pentium 1.33 until 2006.
Then a pentium 4 from 2006 up to 2010 or 2011.

I had a memory from the very first time the PC comes to my house, playing on the black and white theme of the old windows a solitaire or something like that. I was 3 years old. Then a few years later, when the hacker friend of my dad installed installed win95 and upgraded the PC to be a bit more powerful, up to pentium 1.
That time the hacker friend of my dad brought a really awesome game based on ''The Lawnmower Man'' film. I still remember looking at those amazing graphics and thinking, ''wow! so that is virtual reality!''.
And then obviously, when i completed Doom 1.666 for the very first time.

[Stupid Bunny]

Of the actual DOS era, gonna go with playing Rogue on my grandparents’ PC. My grandma was way better at it than me, especially at that young age I was terrible, and would pretty much hack and slash and instantly quaff any mystery potion I found, usually finding myself blind and weak and starving and very dead by the 8th floor or so. It’s amazing, playing it at night in that dusty basement, how scary those little letters became—indeed, they still do. Rogue will make you terrified of the letter G. I’ll never forget the feeling.

 

Post DOS era? Programming a roguelike game in QBASIC on my dad’s old laptop was pretty fun. The game sucks and crashes about 8-10 levels in but it still swims with fond memories of high school. I still have that laptop.

[Arrowhead]

I have this; I was given it by an owner of a computer repair shop.

 

Never used DOS outside of an ancient AS400 ordering system I had to use for work a while back...

 

I've got a portable 3.5 drive, but have never had to use it. The install disks are kind of just a cool curiosity to own nowadays...

 

[Apprentice]

Ahhh MS-DOS, fond memories.

• First game I ever played (on a 286 machine IIRC): Alley Cat
• Most used command: arj a -v1457664 doom.arj -y
• Most played prank: format c: /autotest /u /v:U1D10T

When I was still in school, I and several other knew more about DOS and Windows (3.11) then our computer science teacher did. Note: computer science was still in its infancy and IT was more an afterthought then a mainstream thing. This resulted in a popped up phrase on all networked computers there regarding a certain teacher and a certain dog's apparatus . . .  :D  :D

[leejacksonaudio]

I have a couple of favorite memories.

 

1. Getting to the point where I understood enough to replace command.com with 4dos.com. My life was never the same afterward.

2. Learning enough assembler language to create a program which I put in my autoexec.bat that caused the computer and dot-matrix printer to alternately beep, annoying the hell out of my wife (she deserved it - she was griping at the computer at the time).

 

And yes, I was a programmer before I was a composer. Wrote in C and assembler. Borland C++ was my weapon of choice, although I got stuck using MSC 5.5 at work (the IRS, before I went to Apogee).

[Dusty_Rhodes]

34 minutes ago, leejacksonaudio said:

I have a couple of favorite memories.

 

1. Getting to the point where I understood enough to replace command.com with 4dos.com. My life was never the same afterward.

2. Learning enough assembler language to create a program which I put in my autoexec.bat that caused the computer and dot-matrix printer to alternately beep, annoying the hell out of my wife (she deserved it - she was griping at the computer at the time).

 

And yes, I was a programmer before I was a composer. Wrote in C and assembler. Borland C++ was my weapon of choice, although I got stuck using MSC 5.5 at work (the IRS, before I went to Apogee).

Any old projects you're especially proud of? I'm not a programmer, but the subject interests me.

[PsychEyeball]

My favorite memory of DOS was the day we got our first soundcard. It was a Thunder Board, which essentially was a Sound Blaster 1 but cheaper.

 

Hearing games with sound on blew my mind. Especially Doom. It was such a far cry from the modest PC Speaker blips.

[leejacksonaudio]

16 minutes ago, Dusty_Rhodes said:

Any old projects you're especially proud of? I'm not a programmer, but the subject interests me.

A couple. I wrote a program when I was in the Apogee tech support room for people who had trouble installing Rise of the Triad from the CD onto a compressed drive. It was my first foray into using a third-party library for the display elements. As a matter of fact, you can still find that program on this page - search for ROTTCDI and you'll find it.

 

I'm also kind of proud of a program that I wrote when I became the Apogee/3D Realms Music and Sound Director. The program was for my own personal use during Duke 3D development. It was a calculator that would determine if I was using too much RAM on a Gravis Ultrasound for a song. It was quite complex, but it was blazingly fast. I think I still have the C code around somewhere, but I doubt I could get it to compile on a modern compiler.

[Murdoch]

2 hours ago, leejacksonaudio said:

Getting to the point where I understood enough to replace command.com with 4dos.com. My life was never the same afterward.

 

Haha i remember 4dos.

[Apprentice]

3 hours ago, PsychEyeball said:

My favorite memory of DOS was the day we got our first soundcard. It was a Thunder Board, which essentially was a Sound Blaster 1 but cheaper.

 

Hearing games with sound on blew my mind. Especially Doom. It was such a far cry from the modest PC Speaker blips.

My first soundcard was an AdLib which was followed by a SoundBlaster 2.0 some years later. My last separate soundcard before I started to use the onboard things, was a SoundBlaster AWE 64 which I found the best card I ever had. For my new rig, I am still pondering to get myself a separate one once again . . .

[viti95]

 

My brother bought a brand new 486DX (50MHz) in 1993, with 16Mb of RAM (30 pin SIMMs), a Cirrus Logic GD-5426 Vesa Local Bus card, Sound Blaster clone audio card and a whooping Seagate 2Gb HDD. It was expensive as f*ck (500.000 pesetas, that's nearly 6000€ with inflation in 2021), and the Sony Trinitron 17" monitor was absolutely incredible. That PC could run flawlesly anything you throw at it, even DOOM was very playable. I mostly remember playing games such as The Incredible Machine, Lotus The Ultimate Challenge, Super Stardust '96, Lemmings, X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Indycar Racing, Monkey Island, Skunny: Save our Pizza's, and many more games (Doom, Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3D came much later since my parent's didn't allow me to play those games).

 

I was 6 years old in this photo, and to this date, the same computer is working flawlessly (except the monitor, which died). Those games had some kind of magic, and i've never been tired of playing them. I really miss those big game boxes with large instruction manuals. FastDoom is my little homage to this era.

[prfunky]

Wow!
I bought my first microcomputer with my paper route money
in 1983, an Atari 400. I'll spare you all from what I did
between 1983 and 1993. But in 1993, I bought an Atari XE
Game System (XEGS) which was actually just an Atari 400/800
spiritual successor with a detachable keyboard (a whopping
one and a half foot length cable!). I spent alot of time in
the library back then and I'd read EVERY book on DOS I could
find. I was trying to get a job where I'd be "knowledgeable"
in computers. My Atari & Apple II experience just wasn't
going to cut it in interviews.

 

So, in 1994, I began assembling a PC-compatible computer
with all the money I could muster. I think including the
used Sony monitor, I got an AMD 386dx40Mhz put together with
Trident video card, and ProAudio Spectrum sound card for
about $700. MS-Dos 6.22 just came out. But part of what I
wanted to do is use the PC's hard drive to store Atari
software as no hard drive ever existed for the Atari. I was
going to assemble this kit cable to transfer stuff between
the two. I never got that done. Instead, I got sucked into
the PC world. About this time, I was also on CompuServe on
the Atari and met a, now, lifelong friend who was using a
Commodore 64 to access CompuServe.

 

Anyhow, back to the PC. This computer remained Windows-free
for about the first two years of its service to me. Every
month, I bought a copy of DOS World magazine and would type
in programs for QBasic the same as I did for Apple & Atari
from the old COMPUTE! magazine. There was some goofy fancy
font drawing program that knocked my socks off with its
results. I can't remember what it was called. But the fact
that I could PROGRAM the PC much the same as the old 6502
8-bit computers is what hooked me.

 

It was also useful for my girlfriend at the time as she
used a computer on her job. Had a DOS office suite called
PFS:FirstChoice. Then, I got a few games:
Krusty's Funhouse
Lemmings
a game based on the Wolfenstein 3d engine called Corridor 7

 

By 1996, I had a job fixing PCs for the big local computer
manufacturer/retailer in my town. In 1998, my own business
doing the same. I still hate Windows...

[Grazza]

Although I used computers a lot in the DOS era, I never really used DOS as much as you'd therefore expect. I had already more or less quit programming before I got my first DOS machine, and a lot of my work during that time was done on an Amstrad PCW, which was more convenient for word processing, while I still had a variety of older machines for games and "hobbyist" stuff, such as my beloved MZ-80K (first computer, with its whopping 48 KB of RAM) and a Sinclair QL.

 

I did like the way that in the DOS era it was very feasible for a non-specialist to have a decent grip on what each thing in the box did, and to tinker with both hardware and software without much risk of bricking the whole thing. And as others have said, having what passed for Windows at the time as something you loaded from DOS did make for some fun and games (I renamed a batch file that loaded Doom as WIN.BAT to deter people from snooping into my machine), and it gave some extra options for running software with access to more of those precious and limited resources. The first hard disk I had on a DOS machine was something pitiful like 256 MB. My first 1 GB hard disk seemed huge. Weird to think that something you can get stuck under a fingernail nowadays can hold 1000 times more data.

 

When DOS machines did become my main computers, I spent a lot of time in Wordperfect 5.1. Nowadays using a non-WYSIWYG wordprocessor just seems weird, but it was pretty powerful and reliable, and you got used to having to imagine the page layout rather than seeing it. WYSIWYG programs tended to be slow and clunky, and prone to freezing. When that ceased to be the case, WP51 died fairly quickly. I still have a bunch of WP51 files. The other main program I used in DOS was of course ChessBase. The DOS versions were pretty decent, though each had a number of amusing en passant bugs (I had avoided them even in my chess database program on the MZ-80K). Database searches weren't too slow (there was a lot less data then), but it was much more important to define detailed structured keys, as it wasn't feasible to do position searches in real time while working. My Alekhine Defence key was a true work of art, to the extent that when I saw the godawful keys that accompanied the commercial products from CB, I felt a little sick.

 

The funniest thing I recall was when DOS 4 came out. I was living in Denmark at the time, and apparently MicroSoft had made a big deal of its improved support for foreign languages. My Danish friends were largely unimpressed, and the joke went round that it supported Danish from A-Z. (The point being that all the special letters in Danish come after Z at the end of the alphabet...)

 

Even when Windows became basically the actual operating system rather than something that sat on top of it, I still found use for some DOS stuff. In particular the UNDELETE command was useful when some Windows program malfunctioned and went on a deleting spree. I think some new version of Windows made it harder to use this command, but there was a trick: you needed (counterintuitively) to put in the LOCK command first of all (this prompted a dire warning message). This seemed to work when nothing else would. I still use DOS prompts and commands for things like mass-renaming of files. "REN DSCN*.* DSC1*.*" (or some other digit instead of the 1) is something I use routinely to fix the crappy file naming that Nikon cameras do (they start reusing names, starting with DSCN0001.jpg, once you've taken 10000 photos). I am not sure what I'll do once I reach 100000 photos on this camera next year. Maybe it will be time to upgrade.

 

Edited November 23, 2021 by Grazza

[Aaron Blain]

I played most of what's mentioned in the OP, and also a game called Moon Bugs which mystified me for some time until I eventually tried pressing every key on the keyboard until I discovered that the Fire key is F1.

 

My stepdad pirated Doom and Doom 2 from one of his buddies by copying the installed directory via MSBackup. The stack of 10 floppies had the word D O O M written across the top edges in Sharpie.

 

We had a book from Sams Publishing called Virtual Reality Madness And More!, which I would pore over for hours like it was some kind of magic tome from another dimension. It came with 2 CD-ROMs full of tech and game demos, most of which I couldn't get to run, but the ones that worked amazed me to no end.

 

I also made a bunch of Choose Your Own Adventure games in the form of batch files and later QBasic.

 

I could download game demos from BBS's, but if it was a big one I had to wait until it was time for bed to download it overnight and not tie up the phone. I remember after a few failed tries finally waking up to a working Heretic shareware and being ecstatic.

[ax34]

Commander Keen 4 and 6

Basic and Pascal

Also my screensaver running while Visual Player playing intro music from Pinball Fantasies through PC Speaker in background, and that all on weak 80286.

[MegaZzZeux]

Doom and Duke 3d of course, also Megazeux and ZZT (which of course led to the combo creating my username for the last 20+ years lol)

[Dark Pulse]

Intentionally misreading DOSSHELL as DOS HELL, of course.

[Hellbent]

On 11/20/2021 at 5:03 PM, Stupid Bunny said:

Of the actual DOS era, gonna go with playing Rogue on my grandparents’ PC. My grandma was way better at it than me, especially at that young age I was terrible, and would pretty much hack and slash and instantly quaff any mystery potion I found, usually finding myself blind and weak and starving and very dead by the 8th floor or so. It’s amazing, playing it at night in that dusty basement, how scary those little letters became—indeed, they still do. Rogue will make you terrified of the letter G. I’ll never forget the feeling.

 

Post DOS era? Programming a roguelike game in QBASIC on my dad’s old laptop was pretty fun. The game sucks and crashes about 8-10 levels in but it still swims with fond memories of high school. I still have that laptop.

 I wish I had discovered Rogue back in the day. The first Roguelike I played was Angband in 2013. Man did I fall for that game hard. Its gameplay, writing and atmosphere are great.

[Hellbent]

On 11/23/2021 at 4:01 AM, Grazza said:

Although I used computers a lot in the DOS era, I never really used DOS as much as you'd therefore expect. I had already more or less quit programming before I got my first DOS machine, and a lot of my work during that time was done on an Amstrad PCW, which was more convenient for word processing, while I still had a variety of older machines for games and "hobbyist" stuff, such as my beloved MZ-80K (first computer, with its whopping 48 KB of RAM) and a Sinclair QL.

 

I did like the way that in the DOS era it was very feasible for a non-specialist to have a decent grip on what each thing in the box did, and to tinker with both hardware and software without much risk of bricking the whole thing. And as others have said, having what passed for Windows at the time as something you loaded from DOS did make for some fun and games (I renamed a batch file that loaded Doom as WIN.BAT to deter people from snooping into my machine), and it gave some extra options for running software with access to more of those precious and limited resources. The first hard disk I had on a DOS machine was something pitiful like 256 MB. My first 1 GB hard disk seemed huge. Weird to think that something you can get stuck under a fingernail nowadays can hold 1000 times more data.

 

When DOS machines did become my main computers, I spent a lot of time in Wordperfect 5.1. Nowadays using a non-WYSIWYG wordprocessor just seems weird, but it was pretty powerful and reliable, and you got used to having to imagine the page layout rather than seeing it. WYSIWYG programs tended to be slow and clunky, and prone to freezing. When that ceased to be the case, WP51 died fairly quickly. I still have a bunch of WP51 files. The other main program I used in DOS was of course ChessBase. The DOS versions were pretty decent, though each had a number of amusing en passant bugs (I had avoided them even in my chess database program on the MZ-80K). Database searches weren't too slow (there was a lot less data then), but it was much more important to define detailed structured keys, as it wasn't feasible to do position searches in real time while working. My Alekhine Defence key was a true work of art, to the extent that when I saw the godawful keys that accompanied the commercial products from CB, I felt a little sick.

 

The funniest thing I recall was when DOS 4 came out. I was living in Denmark at the time, and apparently MicroSoft had made a big deal of its improved support for foreign languages. My Danish friends were largely unimpressed, and the joke went round that it supported Danish from A-Z. (The point being that all the special letters in Danish come after Z at the end of the alphabet...)

 

Even when Windows became basically the actual operating system rather than something that sat on top of it, I still found use for some DOS stuff. In particular the UNDELETE command was useful when some Windows program malfunctioned and went on a deleting spree. I think some new version of Windows made it harder to use this command, but there was a trick: you needed (counterintuitively) to put in the LOCK command first of all (this prompted a dire warning message). This seemed to work when nothing else would. I still use DOS prompts and commands for things like mass-renaming of files. "REN DSCN*.* DSC1*.*" (or some other digit instead of the 1) is something I use routinely to fix the crappy file naming that Nikon cameras do (they start reusing names, starting with DSCN0001.jpg, once you've taken 10000 photos). I am not sure what I'll do once I reach 100000 photos on this camera next year. Maybe it will be time to upgrade.

 

I remember WordPerfect. It was my first experience going from writing school papers by hand to using the computer. I remember being puzzled at how my dad found the program logical and easy to use when I was so mystified by its non WYSIWYG nature, particularly the TAB mode. He'd explain it to me, but it was too abstract for me at the time to understand. He used to get aggravated at me when I'd use the space bar instead of the TAB key. He'd exclaim something about "formatting" and how using the spacebar was not the right way to create indentations for my paragraphs. I didn't understand why I couldn't just use the spacebar if I was more comfortable with it; why did it matter if the desired effect was the same? Something to the effect of "You can't use the spacebar the formatting will be all wrong" would be his energized reply. (Of course I later came to understand the formatting issues of only using the spacebar).

 

I forgot about that one. That was one of my fondest memories of actually using DOS: all the powerful ways I could use * when mass copying or renaming files. Took me a minute to understand what my dad meant by "wildcard" ("What does a Rummy card game have to do with computers?" was my thought at the time). :D