ten(10) systems with five of them on a home network. I have several versions of MS-DOS and I know the deepest and darkest secrets

about MS-DOS used in Windows Me and Windows XP (I use XP Professional). Drop me a line and ask me a question related to DOS.

Walter Ivey

I actually grew up using both DOS and Windows 3.1. My grandparents both worked at IBM all their lives, so I was brought up in a very pro-computer enviroment. Their computer ran DOS, and those big old floppies (the ones that actually, you know, flop?). If I wanted to play games, I actually had to enter in commands at a prompt. Although my family's home computer had Windows 3.1 on it, I still had to log out of it, boot into DOS (still can't remember how exactly that worked. It was kind of like GRUB, or dual booting; basically a black screen where I select what OS I want), and enter commands for the game.

I've since lost most of my knowledge with it. I can do cd, dir, fdisk, and basic stuff like that, but that's about it. Also, the whole t-shirt thing is hilarious. If the free shirts aren't jokes as well, I'd love one. Nothing says geek like a shirt that says "Save DOS" on it.

I have it set up to boot to a DOS Prompt and to get to Windows 3.11, I type in WIN and press ENTER. I still have over 600 5.25-inch 360KB floppy

disks and more than 1100 3.5-inch 1.44GB floppies loaded with all sorts of apps, utility files, and games. I have six (6) CDs from the Software

Vault (Diamond, Emerald, Ruby, etc.) which are Bulletin Board (BBS) feeders. All told, I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 35,000 files

in an archive. The ten (10) computer systems that I keep in a Digital Laboratory of sorts are all up-and-running with a flip of a power strip!

I have Windows 95, 97, 98. 98SE, Me, XP Professional, XP Media, the 3.11 system, an Apple IIc, and two systems running pure MS-DOS where

I work with my archived files. I will celebrate my 77th birthday come June, and I am twice-retired. If you have Windows XP, select a file from

any folder and then open a Command Prompt window and type in (filename) DOS or whatever text string you want to look for. I will

send you a link to where you can see examples of what is hidden in Windows XP Professional. Thanks for the POST and visit me often.

Walter Ivey

I finally treated myself to a new car w/an automatic in 2004. Please send me a t-shirt in size XLarge. thanks

I remember that I first used DOS 5.0 in the summer of 1993; I liked the command line. I did NOT like Windows 3.1; it was just a fancy shell for DOS, which made computers slower and less stable... sounds familiar, doesn't it? Nothing much has changed about Microsoft products in the intervening years, which is a disgrace; they're just more bloated and even less stable than they originally were; Gates and his hand-picked hand puppet Ballmer should be horsewhipped for that.

I don't miss DOS; this is an old Win2k box, I also have an XP Pro rig, but my other systems all run GNU/Linux distros, and I really dislike the M$ products. Vista is total junk; bloated to the Nth degree, and bought by people who don't actually know how to use a computer. They'll never know the power of the command line, and how much more productive they could be if they switched to Linux. I only keep my WinBlows rigs because I post advice in several online forums, and I need them so I can duplicate problems, then figure out how to solve them for the Windozers requesting help...

The true innovators are people such as Woz, Stallman,
Metcalfe, Raymond, Berners-Lee, Cailliau, and Torvalds, with an
honorable mention to Jobs. Gates' only "innovations" are based on how
fast he can write a check and co-opt the next advancement in personal
computing. He "innovated" MS-DOS, GUI-based operating systems, Internet
Explorer... the list is long but pathetically undistinguished.

PCLinuxOS, Kubuntu, Puppy, Knoppix, Mint, Xandros... I prefer those OSes over the JUNK Bill Gates has been peddling since he bought QDOS from Seattle Computer Products, back in 1981. Windows is a JOKE, really just a toy "operating system", and Gates has made malware ubiquitous by conning people into using his obnoxious bloatware. In fact, selling Windows to the masses as a desktop OS might well be the greatest prank in the history of the universe, even better than the Save DOS "movement". Gates is nothing more than the richest carny in the world. He should be embarrassed by that, but you can't shame a snakeoil salesman. If Gates thought he could make a NICKEL selling DOS again, it would be available on every street corner next week. He continues to pimp Windows only because he doesn't have all the money in the solar system, YET. Give him time; DOS could still have a future, if Gates can fool the unwashed multitude into believing they "need" it.

Come to think of it, someone should remind Al Gore that it was actually Bill Gates who created the Internet, and on the eighth day, he rested...

As for me, give me Linux, or give me death!

Click the above link to read the Google Document that I posted to the Internet showing (verifying) that MS-DOS 5.0

is the Operating System that makes Windows XP Professional hum.

Walter Ivey