The Ten Commandments of DOS

Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Mon Jul 28, 2003 8:28 pm

I am thy DOS, thou shall have no OS before me, unless Bill Gates gets a cut of the profits therefrom.

Thy DOS is a character based, single user, single tasking, standalone operating system. Thou shall not attempt to make DOS network, multitask, or display a graphical user interface, for that would be a gross hack .

Thy hard disk shall never have more than 1024 sectors. You don't need that much space anyway.

Thy application program and data shall all fit in 640K of RAM. After all, it's ten times what you had on a CP/M machine. Keep holy this 640K of RAM, and clutter it not with device drivers, memory managers, or other things that might make thy computer useful.

Thou shall use the one true slash character to separate thy directory path. Thou shall learn and love this character, even though it appears on no typewriter keyboard, and is unfamiliar. Standardization on where that character is located on a computer keyboard is right out .

Thou shall edit and shuffle the sacred lines of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT until DOS functions adequately for the likes of you. Giving up in disgust is not allowed.

Know in thy heart that DOS shall always maintain backward compatibility to the holy 2.0 version, blindly ignoring opportunities to become compatible with things created in the latter half of this century. But you can still run WordStar 1.0

Improve thy memory, for thou shall be required to remember that JD031792.LTR is the letter that you wrote to Jane Doe three years ago regarding the tax deductible contribution that you made to her organization. The IRS Auditor shall be impressed by thy memory as he stands over you demanding proof .

Pick carefully the names of thy directories, for renaming them shall be mighty difficult. While you're at it, don't try to relocate branches of the directory tree, either.

Learn well the Vulcan Nerve Pinch (ctrl-alt-del) for it shall be thy saviour on many an occasion. Believe in thy heart that everyone reboots their OS to solve problems that shouldn't occur in the first place.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:1143, old post ID:10090

Chris Vogel · Post by **Chris Vogel** » Mon Jul 28, 2003 10:34 pm

Thou shall use the one true slash character to separate thy directory path. Thou shall learn and love this character, even though it appears on no typewriter keyboard, and is unfamiliar. Standardization on where that character is located on a computer keyboard is right out .

I hate that! Why couldn't they have just used the "/" instead?

That was funny...

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:1143, old post ID:10117

Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Tue Jul 29, 2003 11:22 am

"Pick carefully the names of thy directories, for renaming them shall be mighty difficult. While you're at it, don't try to relocate branches of the directory tree, either."

Yeah I don't know why they use the slash. Everything else uses the / slash! The slash is a good way to make a website only work in IE, but why would you want to do that?

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jryan · Post by **jryan** » Tue Jul 29, 2003 11:47 pm

One correction about your commandments of DOS. It can network, I have done it using MS-DOS 6.22, it was quite funny.

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Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Wed Jul 30, 2003 12:28 pm

Yeah I heard you can network in dos, but need special drivers and resident memory things, which would break some of these commandments

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jryan · Post by **jryan** » Wed Jul 30, 2003 1:52 pm

Actually, the only part about the commandments that would be broken is not to make DOS network. All the funcionality for networking is built-in already, you just have to make it active by adding lines to config.sys and autoexec.bat which are clearly allowed.

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Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Wed Jul 30, 2003 2:42 pm

Really? Don't you need to download this 3rd party network utility or something, then find the right dos drivers for the network cards and all that? Did not know it was built in. Something I should try out. I can maybe make a dos based server program... that would be... different.

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