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OIM20

Well-Known Member
I remember DOS! You could reformat the hard drive of the computer you were working on with a 1 line command. I shudder to think what would happen today is such a thing were still possible! LOL
You mean you can't do this from the command prompt? I don't have a hard drive or thumb drive I'm willing to sacrifice atm to test it, so does anyone know?
 

Gladiola

Well-Known Member
I fondly remember my Commodore Vic 20, where the "hard drive" was a cassette tape player. You could reformat that with a magnet.
 

Gladiola

Well-Known Member
The Commodore 64 was a much more usable computer. The Vic 20 you could, if you were very accomplished, do some basic word processing. My uncle worked for Commodore, so we got a Vic 20 for one Christmas and a 64 the year after.
 

Guurt The Destroyer

Well-Known Member
The first computer that I ever wrote code on was a Radio Shack TRS80. I made a simple Invaders style game as well as some text only adventures.

A friend of mine had a Commodore 64. I don't remember the Vic 20.
 

Gladiola

Well-Known Member
@Guurt The Destroyer It might not even have been widely released. Maybe we only got one because my uncle worked there and they gave them away to employees or offered deep discounts because computers were leaping ahead so quickly at the time that it was obsolete when it was manufactured. This would have been around 1980 or so.
 

Guurt The Destroyer

Well-Known Member
@Guurt The Destroyer It might not even have been widely released. Maybe we only got one because my uncle worked there and they gave them away to employees or offered deep discounts because computers were leaping ahead so quickly at the time that it was obsolete when it was manufactured. This would have been around 1980 or so.

For the record, I wasn't doubting you or the existence of the Vic 20. I was just saying I wasn't familiar with it. I am sure there are a bunch of computers I wasn't familiar with. Back then it was easy not to know about things. Plus I was just a kid. The world is so different now.
 

Iyapo1

Well-Known Member
You mean you can't do this from the command prompt? I don't have a hard drive or thumb drive I'm willing to sacrifice atm to test it, so does anyone know?
Most people dont know how to bring up the command prompt. Which is a really good thing since most new computers have pre-partitioned hard drives and reformatting can destroy all backups and assorted data storage areas.
 
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getmomo

Well-Known Member
My first computer was the Adam which my colecovision plugged into. It had digital data packs (tape) and a daisy wheel printer.
 

ajqtrz

Chef - loquacious Old Dog
You can format your drive from a DOS prompt provided you open it as "Administrator." You can, in fact, do almost everything you did in DOS before they got to Windows 95, but if you do you have to have the DOS software to do it....and a lot of that is not included in anything past Windows 95.

Technically most operating systems up to about 2010 (which is about when I stopped teaching technology), rely upon three basic programs: 1 to address and communicate with hardware, a 2nd to address and communicate with software, and a third, to provide for a user interface. In DOS the originals were io.sys, (hardware interface), msdos.sys (software interface) and command.com (user interface). This structure was imported from UNIX for the most part. The user interface part had some basic functions built in. Like "DIR" (LS in UNIX) and "CLS" and so on. I believer there were 14 of them, including Copy, Del and so on, built into Command.com. And you could, as you could in UNIX, change your user interface. The "Shell" command did that. In any case, the interesting thing to me is that, as far as I can tell, most operating systems still have this core three file (technically 2, with the user interface not actually needed in some instances), structure and pretty much everything in OS's has focused on moving functions from user invoked to automatic (done by the equivalent of io.sys or msdos.sys).

Sorry if I've, again, stepped on toes by displaying a silly level of detail but what are all my tiny bits of information good for if not shared? ;)

'AJ
 

Henroo

Oh Wise One
Seeing a lot of love for the Commodore 64 here! Gonna throw a few game titles out. Respond if you also played these games on C64!

1. Bards Tale 1 and Bards Tale 2.
2. Rebels and Lords
3. Wizard's Crown
4. Gettysburg: The Turning Point
 

Gath Of Baal

Well-Known Member
Seeing a lot of love for the Commodore 64 here! Gonna throw a few game titles out. Respond if you also played these games on C64!

1. Bards Tale 1 and Bards Tale 2.
2. Rebels and Lords
3. Wizard's Crown
4. Gettysburg: The Turning Point


Yeah pretty much any game made by SSI or Origin was great. I own all of the mid to late 80s early 90s titles to include all the Gold Box SSI games like Dragonlance, Pool Of Radiance, Hillsfar, I have all the Ultima series and have been offered some serious money for all in a package deal, but I refuse to sell off all the hours spent having fun nostalgia from my early teens
 

Player9999

Member
You youngsters!

By 1970 I had a remote access account to Dartmouth's Itty Bitty mainframe (around age 12-13).

The next year I had local access to a DEC pdp-8e, on which I learned ASM, FORTRAN, COBOL, FOCAL, and a couple other BASIC variants. Plus certain manual toggle entry code operations, useful later for setup of certain high end ESDI and SCSI controllers or video cards.

Before most of those toy computers mentioned here existed, I had a cp/m machine at home, and bought full doc's and upgraded BIOS from Micro-Cornucopia (other than National et al chip data books on my generic reference shelves), and as newer chips came out, doubled its clock speed with a PCB trace hack, and faster Zilog Z-80b CPU. That had a pair of Tandon TM100-2 5.25" floppies, each then worth more than a several TB HDD or basic SSD now. Some larger Japanese crooks ultimately bankrupted Tandon, with blatant Patent thefts, and far bigger budgets for crooked lawyers.

Next progression was getting online in the old days of ARPAnet, Usenet, BITNet, and comix characters named services. Unix was still AT&T's toll center toy, other than sharing with NASA (where some friends worked) to enable space flights on low memory systems re: workloads, and before the advent of Penguin stuffed animals at the better tech's workstations. As a gateway for better access than CI$ and before AOHell's rubber room for Trash-80 types who didn't realize how horrendous a real Digital Research cp/m manual (set) was (but it wasn't crippled to simplify options for low-tech users), I got a Racal Vadic 3400 modem (1200 bps, predating Bell 212), when others were just getting Bell 103 protocol (the last step where Baud = bps rates, but so blazing fast thanks to error correcting block sends of X-modem from Ward Christensen, Bellcore/WE "bandwidth must be 16 times Baud min for reliable data" standards were broken. That gateway access to the outer world was hosted on a VAX 11-780.

Over the years I've been in an underground bunker based Lucent IV-ESS tandem toll center like what we blew up in Bhagdad, and a telco DSC opposite the state's NOC primary of two "war room", with access to every SONET fiber path in the state, linking then still not independently homed data backbones, major customers, major data hub loop, and regular telco CO (mostly there Lucent V-ESS's, that work better than Nortel's or some others).

Yesterday I was doing some casual reading (gach!), of ITU, IETF, and CableLabs standards documents, trying to sort out some details of QAM-128 to 4096 Codeword Constellations coexisting for DOCSIS 3.0 to 3.1 transitions, with some suspicion that two major CATV's are scamming customers a bit on key details. Somewhere along the way there, I've done a few odd projects to help "build this city" of tech no one likely to be able to read this hasn't used. Or called out a few screwups, like when USR Courier firmware got miscoded adding CID and Distinctive Ringing features, so they had a 7 second dead period and caused call collisions (and ended up consulting with their Senior Firmware engineering team leader Joe F. after breaking through an obnoxious corporate blowoff structure, that wouldn't exist absent the 90% of support calls from incompetent, lazy, and crazy users previously mentioned, in a roughly 50-30-10% breakout). But, not a lot of users can identify timing windows of SS-7 and POTS interactions with high end modem firmware, certain common models of CO switches, and system tools, even among bright pro's, like the world leading engineers I had to ridicule as the "Useless Robots of Skokie" to break through business management and "customer service" abuses and get to pay attention.

But somehow I end up here playing some silly game? ;-)

As to DOS history, and hint, newer end of its life cycle actually overlapping OS/2 (IBM designed the linked files MS sort of stole) and OS9 (microcontroller oriented, not Apple), who recalls which versions were illegal for Gates to sell (and why?), or the subversions after MS lost big time in court, but extorted the victim to sell out for a third the court awarded damages rather than be buried in litigation costs and time delays?
 
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