Retro Computing, Miniature O.S. Fetishizing

I have a box on my main workstation desk that is more powerful than the IBM two-story mainframes of the 70's, and when I get bored, I wheel the chair over to the 286...

Perhaps it has something to do with the absurd bloat of modern installations of WINDOWS and mainstream LINUX distros, but I basically have a fetish for old computing. After a long day of building complicated vector animations and dealing with images bigger than the hard-drives of my youth, I love kicking back with a bottle of beer and a game of ADOM or ZORK...

A:\

When I returned to Univeristy in 1999 after a 4-year sabbatical, I had virtually no knowledge of modern Operating Systems, and had only an ancient 286 laptop that I had been using since middle school to write papers with. It had like 50mb of disk space or something, and a very old version of Word Perfect.

I was issued a small paperback manual on the university mainframe computer system. It was HP-UNIX and everyone was given a shell account with PINE mail, etc, even though no one was taught how to use it... I was broke, ignorant, and really wanted to check my email from home.

I discovered that the old 286, which was actually the property of a large chemical corporation in the 1980's, had a full suite of modem-telnet tools. I read the manuals and soon had the machine wired through my phone connection to "FRANK," MTSU's HP-UNIX via telnet. I was absolutely hooked.

For two semesters I used this primitive setup daily, and in the process learned my way around the UNIX shell environment, which turned out to be very beneficial later when I started programming CGI for the web.

I was pretty much the only student outside of the computer science department that knew anything about the old mainframe system, and any LINUX hacker or pre-windows computer user knows that mainframes are actually very robust and dependable for productivity, as the files are located on a central machine: no MS-WORD compatibility problems, no damaged floppy sectors.

Letting the Command Prompt Go Ain't Easy

Eventually I gave in, went to Office Max and purchased a terribly overpriced Pentium 2. I was in heaven. After experiencing the web through graphical browsers, I knew that I wanted to do web design.

I had free webspace on the university server, and I wanted to use it. Unfortunately, I was a bit ignorant on protocols, and thought the only way to send files was the way I used to do it: Z-Modem. So, I proceeded to build a website for my band using nothing but an image editor and a terminal with Z-Modem. Files only seemed to successfully upload %50 of the time, but I was patient, and soon had a very impressive little website going. It was the beginning.

Today, I have broadband, a home network with 3 workstations and a LINUX server, and computers and computer parts in my office and attic. I just can't turn down computers, and people throw away their old "obsolete machines" all the time. I think, "man, at one point, people would drool over this junk.. and it still has a lot of functionality!"

Fornutaly, my wife won't let me bring in anymore abandoned circuitry. Anymore, I am definitely selective. I keep my eye out for machines that have historical significance, like old Ataris, C-64s, Apple ][ E's, etc.. My pride and joy is a fully operational Mac Plus that my neighbor put on the junk pile. I mean, c'mon, it was the first windowing desktop for the home computer market!

MS-DOS is gone, but the cult lives.

MS-DOS R.I.P.
By Jonathan Erickson
October 29, 2001

MS-DOS passed away Thursday, October 25, 2001, at the Marriott Marquis Hotel on Times Square in New York City.

MS-DOS was born in August 1980, in Tukwila, Washington, the creation of Tim Paterson and the Seattle Computer Company. Initially called QDOS 0.10 (short for "Quick and Dirty Operating System"), MS-DOS was a lifelong resident of the Seattle area. In late 1980, nonexclusive rights for 86-DOS 0.3, as the operating system was then known, were sold to Microsoft. In July 1981, as Paterson recounted in a June 1983 BYTE article entitled "A Short History of MS-DOS," Microsoft bought all rights to the DOS from Seattle Computer and changed the name of the operating system to "MS-DOS."

In the 1980s and early 1990s, MS-DOS was arguably the most widely used computer program in the world. There were many reasons for this, the least of which was the historical rise of the personal computer. But what set MS-DOS apart from other players in the personal computer operating system arena was Paterson's desire to make application development as easy as possible for software developers. To this end, Paterson made the MS-DOS API similar to CP/M, an 8-bit operating system in widespread use at the time. Secondly, Paterson focused on making MS-DOS fast and efficient, something he achieved by writing it entirely in 8086 assembly language.

MS-DOS is survived by Windows 98, XP, Me, 2000, and CE, all of the same home. MS-DOS was preceded in death by Windows 1.0, 3.0, 95, and Windows for Pens.

In announcing MS-DOS's demise, Microsoft founder Bill Gates typed "exit" at the MS-DOS command line during the launch of Windows XP. He stated, "It's the end of the MS-DOS era," referring to the exorcism of 16-bit code from the Windows code base.

In many respects, the demise of DOS was long overdue. It limited the Macro architecture of windows, and should have been replaced by the LINUX kernel as soon as Torvolds released the code...

But DOS was really designed to be a very tiny OS for the RAM limitations of early home computers. It originally got it's name from QDOS, which was the Quick and Dirty Operating System. And really, as far as size is concerned, DOS is still a wonderfully compact OS that gets the job done.

Like a lot of people growing up during the Star-Wars years, DOS was our first experience with communicating with a computer. I had an early TI-004a (1982) that came with a variation of DOS, and all schools used Apple II's up until the 90's (AppleDOS). So, DOS is an old friend, and when WINDOWS inevitably fucks up, a DOS floppy is always there to save your ass.

I am a collector of DOS software, since so much of it is abandoned and available for download, and it is pretty amazing what you can do with an old machine and the right DOS setup!