Did you use DOS?

Did you use DOS?

  • Yes

    Votes: 46 100.0%
  • No

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Comedy 'What's DOS' option.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    46

TyeDyeBoy

Spaceman
I have this theory that perhaps the lot of you can help me with. I won't describe the theory here, because I don't want to taint the experiment, but go along with me on this.

The question is simple: Did you use MS-DOS or some variant thereof prior to Windows 95, or have you never worked with PURE DOS? I don't mean opening a DOS box in Windows, I mean straight up DOS, no GUI for you. Please answer the poll, and then give a quick description here of what you were using/doing when you first got to work on computers. I'll post my own answer as an example.

I started using computers around 1984-85, and did use MS-DOS. I briefly also used Norton Commander, but used DOS almost constantly until about 1997, when I got into college and had a laptop with Windows 95, as well as getting a new PC with 95.

Once I've had enough sampling information, I'll let you all in on the theory. I'm pretty sure most of the regulars here will agree with it wholeheartedly.
 
I used DOS - barely - back in '94, when I was all of six years old and brand new to computing. Got '95 soon after, but still relied on DOS for running old games, and after reading DOS for Dummies (hehe, great book though) managed to pick up some DOS sk1llz.

Now, if you mean DOS without Windows, then no, I have always had Windows or some varient on my computers. I voted "yes", in the poll, though - I'm not sure if that's entirely helpful.
 
I bought my first PC in 1990
It was an XT with a 5 1/4 floppy drive,No HD and monochromatic monitor (Samsung)
I used DOS until W95 appeared.
I used also Norton Commander,Lotus,Qbasic and that thing called Win 3.1 and 3.11 but not too much because it wasn't usefull at that time (i used 3.1 only so i can use the Star Trek Afterdark Screen saver with Spock and those brains from TOS)
IIRC i used DOS 3.0,3.3,4.0,5.0 until 6.0 (ieven more i have the manual of DOS 6.0 )
I believe that 7.0 was included in W95 or something strange like that IIRC
 
MS-Dos 3.2, 5.0 and 6.22 (& Windows 3.11 for workgroups) and I held out until 1998 with 98 se, then went straight to XP. There was a brief one day flirt with OS/2 warp 3

But I did cheat and use PC Tools.

Speaking of which, anyone ever use QEMM?
 
I've used QEMM, I was quite impressed. It gave my computer an AMAZING speed boost back in the day. It worked even better under Win 95 after that came around.

I worked with DOS since about 93 or 94. I got Win 95 around 96. I did run pure DOS (not even win 3.1) for about six months, on a 286-8. Those were the days. It was actually running DOS 6.2, though I have 6.22 now. I keep it around in case I need it.
 
I started with DOS around the time my dad purchased his first IBM Compatible in late 1990 (we got Wing Commander shortly afterward)...however, before that, I dealt with AmigaDOS and Workbench (and a C64 and 128 before that)...speaking of which, I wonder how the first two games would look on that old computer :-D

Speaking of Quarterdeck....though it would annoy me from time to time, it was a real boon...excellent program.
 
My first computer was a Dell 320 SX and she ran, I believe, DOS 5.0.

I have extremely fond memories of doing reports using EDIT instead of Wordperfect.
 
I started on a Tandy 1000 in 1987. Space Quest was my first computer game and still remains one of my single favorites. There was a program called XTree Pro for "graphical" browsing on the system, but I rarely used it. I didn't have many games, and I did have a lot of free time.. I spent literally hours cruising around the directory structure of the 20 meg hard drive tuning files and stuff like that.
Some years later I got a 486/66 with DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1. Windows was pretty neat, but I did spend a lot of time in DOS still since games didn't really run in it too well. I remember when I got some sort of disc that upgraded my stuff so I could watch the WC3 Behind the Screens CD in Windows in full 256 color glory.
So we're looking at about 1994 for that. It was about that time that I got AOL and started frequenting the AOL official Origin area.
Got Windows 95 not long after and then WC4. Around 1996 I switched up to a Pentium 100 and got full internet access where I reached alt.games.wing-commander. Played through Prophecy and Secret Ops on that P100. In 2000 I got a P3/500 with Windows 98 and eventually cable internet. Then a Duron 900. Switched to XP when I upgraded to an Athlon XP 2100.
 
I started with some 386 running DR. DOS my uncle bought back in 1992, quickly switching to MS-DOS when noticing verty few applications worked with DR. DOS. This box was Windows free. I used that until I bought my own late 1994. This was a 486 with PC DOS and Windows 3.1. I got every Windows version later nearly when they were released.

SO, yes, I have used pure DOS.
 
Hmm, the sampling is skewed more than I'd expected, though what little data has been presented does sorta halfway confirm my hypothesis. It'll have to run a day or so to be sure.
 
I find that Wing Commander fans seem to fall into three groups - people who have been fans all along (~15%), people who have been fans since WC3 (~70%) and people who became fans recently (Prophecy or afterwards - ~15%). That still means that most of them were DOS uses for at least a while.

(I grew up with DOS, myself. The first GUI I used on a regular basis was a horrible Windows knockoff called "GEM" in ~1992.)
 
I've seen them all come and go...
Started with 'computers' with a Phillips console which actually enabled one to do some whacko assembler/machine code mix.

As that one was too hard for me at the age of 9 (wow who would have though that) I later got my first computerish thing, a Schneider CPC 6128 (I think those went by the name of Armstrad in the US). Which is basically a C128 power wise (but over all better AFAIK). It already had a built in disk drive (3" disks, no, not 3.5", really 3"). That one had Basic, AMSDOS (a mixture of CPM and Basic) and CPM+ (kinda a predecessor of DOS).

In school I had some 3.x DOS.

My first PC was a 286-16 with DOS 4.01.

Used about every DOS since then, including DRDOS. Used tools like Quemm (albeit they make the system unstable) Norton Commander (which is an awesome tool, still use it today) and 4DOS (awesome DOS extension).

Tried stuff like DOSCommander (IIRC), that Windows 2.0'ish GUIs that came with later DOSes.

Picked up Win30, 31 and 311 somewhere along the way and always hated them, tho they made good trading objects to obtain useful pirated software. But as they didn't interfere with DOS I had them on HD.

Refused Win9x for as long as possibe tho I'v got to say it is better then Win3.11.

I'v seen used pretty much every OS by now except BEOS and MacOS and still have the opinion that Windows is worst and only a ripoff of those (and before you say that the GUI of Longhorn is an innovation have a look at the NEXT system)
 
My DOS time started in 1994 (a Tandy (un)Sensation(al)!, with 486SX/25, 4MB, 256KB on-board video, 1x CD, 107MB HD, 2400 modem.) MS-DOS 5.0 (later upgraded to 6.22, thanks to a friend in the FT "A" school a class ahead of me) and Win 3.1 (which went away PDQ because of the aforementioned 107MB drive). I only went to Win95 in 1997 (P166 home-built system by that point) because Prophecy required it, and a year or so later acquired *cough* a copy of 98 (no SE), which then later got upgraded to SE.
 
Oh yeah I used DOS back in the day. got my first system in 1989.. I still have my Original MSDOS 3 5.25" floppies too :)

Im pretty sure that most of us WC fans that date to the original game have DOS skills (I would hope :))
 
I first started using computers around 1990. An XT with no hard drive, where you had to insert the DOS 4.0 floppy every time you started the computer. Upgraded to a 286 and then a 386 soon afterwards. Subsequent upgrades came very slowly, and I still had a DOS-based 486DX 66MHz at home as late as 1998. Then we switched to a P2 350MHz with Win98, and sadly, that was the end of DOS. Since then, I'd switched computers about three times. I keep planning to resurrect that old P2 350MHz as a DOS machine for Priv and Armada, but I never seem to get around to it.
 
I got my first computer in 1984–IBM’s original, floppy-only, PC (choosing it over the Mac), which IIRC used what IBM officially called “PC-DOS”. My father got his first computer at around the same time, IBM’s XT. We used them for word processing; I preferred the new WordPerfect 4.0, he used Multimate. Later, I got an IBM 286, not the original AT, but the then new PS/2. And later still, moved to and assembled a 486/33. At that time, 1990 or 1991, I switched to using Windows 3.0 and Norton Desktop. My father later bought another IBM machine with OS/2, which I got to learn how to use. I skipped Win95, but upgraded to Win98 (and a PII machine) when it was released.
 
IIRC, my first computer was my brother's Emerson 286-16MHz box. He had the hard drive compressed to 40 megs, which probably wasn't a good idea. He gave it to me in 1993 when he bought what would be my next box. The 286 had some old version of DOS. It came with WordPerfect, a Basic compiler and a sweet (for the time) voice output engine (Enter text, and it speaks to you. Great for answering machines...). I had a Disney Sound Source on that sucker, so playing games like Wolfenstein 3d were a trip. It had Wing Commander II on it when my brother gave it to me, but there was some file corruption, and it didn't work. It took me three different floppy disk sets of Wing Commander 1 to finally get it installed (the floppies sitting in those game boxes were getting old by spring of '94), but I played that game relentlessly when I got it installed. My 286 died a couple years ago. We retired it with a full reformat, a couple paintball gun C0_2 tanks and a wedge hammer fittingly nicknamed "The Big Cheese"...

My next box I got in '97. It was an AST 486-DX2 66Mhz with Windows 95 (and a Win97 desktop background, IIRC...), two hard drives, sixteen megs of RAM, a Sound Blaster AWE32, and (gasp!) a full meg of video memory on an ATI card! It ran WC3 like a dream, and I finally got a chance to play WC2, as well as Privateer, Armada and Academy. I mostly used DOS after a cold reboot to play my games. It was simply more fun that way! C'mon, don't tell me you all didn't enjoy tweaking your autoexec.bat's and your config.sys's and boot.ini's... The computer was a dream in DOS, especially when I downloaded Creative's AWE32 DOS software a little later on. The 486, which by brother named "Glauert" after a famous engineer, died a horrible two-pronged death when my little brother deleted the Windows directory and my old-school GoldStar 2x CD-ROM drive quit working. It was a donor, though. It donated its power supply so that a friend's Pentium could live on...

I got a Pentium 3 450 after that. Powerhouse at the time. Pentium 3's had only been out a month when we bought it. Prophecy was the first game I bought for it (we got the computer a few days before my 15th birthday). I still used DOS occasionally to play older games, but it wasn't as fun, or my hardware as compatible, as it used to be. After that I got a P4 laptop with XP for college (plays Freelancer pretty well), and my little brothers have gotten themselves a powerhouse AMD box. I do have some Macs, one of which I'm going to power back up when I find a copy of Super Wing Commander. But for now, it waits...
 
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