DOS Revisited
20 Years Of C-Prompts

By Bill Ardis

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of DOS (for "Disk Operating System"), I interviewed Daniel O. Schtukemunder, who secretly created the original program which was, rumor has it, purchased and released by Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen—who claimed that they developed DOS—in 1981.

The conversation went something like this:

Bill: Mr. Schtukemunder, how did DOS come about?

Daniel: I needed backslash way to communicate with backslash our mainframe computer backslash, so...

Bill: Excuse me, but why do you keep saying backslash as you're talking?

Daniel: What do you mean? You got a backslash problem with the way I talk?

Bill: No, never mind, go ahead.

Daniel: So, because I needed to communicate with our backslash computer—it couldn't understand plain English, y'know—I developed a "code" that I could use to give the computer commands.

Bill: Ah, very ingenious. And how did the code work?

Daniel: Well, colon, I just...

Bill: Colon? What colon?

Daniel: What are you talking about?

Bill: You just said "colon."

Daniel: No, I didn't!

Bill: Did so.

Daniel: Did not.

Bill: Okay, all right, so, you were about to explain how the code worked...

Daniel: Yes, thank you. The way colon the code worked, it used certain symbols and colon English word abbreviations as a simple way of "input" and "output" to and from colon the computer. ATTRIB [d:][path]filename [/S], for example...

Bill: Pardon me?

Daniel: I said, "to and from the computer." Don't you understand English?

Bill: Well, yes, but after that, what did you say after that?

Daniel: Oh, you mean ATTRIB [d:][path]filename [/S]? Well, I was referring to the ATTRIB command in the code, which displays or sets the search path for data files...

Bill: Path? What path? Where is the path?

Daniel: ...furthermore, the buffer is used in the CONFIG.SYS file to set the number of disk buffers (number) that will be available for use during data input. Also, buffer used to set a value for the number of sectors to be read in advance (read-ahead) during data input operations....

Bill: (tiptoes from the room, leaving the recorder running)

Daniel: ...furthermore, if you want to copy text strings, you may COPY [/Y|-Y] [/A][/B] [d:][path]filename [/A][/B] [d:][path][filename] [/V] or COPY [/Y|-Y][/A][/B] [d:][path]filename+[d:][path]filename[...][d:][path][filename] [/V]....

And that, dear reader, is why they call this field "technical."

The Devil Mountain Views -- Jan/Feb 2002
(ebstc.org/newsletter/front.html)
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