Back In My Day...

I had cause today to reflect on times and skills gone by as I was reduced to using the command line for certain tasks on my computer. My first computer was nothing but command line – no GUI whatsoever. Plus, you pretty much had to write all your own programs. No stealing from the Internet, either, as that really didn’t exist as an entity at the time. The first “modern” machines that I worked with was an Apple IIE and a Macintosh “C.” You still had to do most of the work yourself, but there were at least programs that you could buy. The Apple took those delicious 5 ¼” floppies. The Mac took the more traditional floppies, but it required about 140 trillion to carry a program like Word. Software installation was a major undertaking and was only entered into after the proper sacrifices had been made to the appropriate digital deities.

My first PC was a ProGen, which was an epoch-equivalent of an e-Machine. The software situation still being dicey, at best, one had to default to DOS, to accomplish many tasks and perform routine maintenance. There was a day when I had a strong command of DOS; today, I have a hard time remembering what DOS stands for…(ok, it means “disk operating system,” but you get my point). It is so rare for the modern computer user to require peeking behind the curtain of the bells-and-whistles operating systems that it has even become difficult on recent machines to find the mystical portal to the command prompt. It is not totally without reason; there is a ridiculous amount of damage that you can do playing around with a command-line interface.

Today, though, I had to run a few programs written off the grid – highly functional but explicitly not user friendly. That meant a return to the glorious yin-yang of black screen with white text. I am happy to say that the computer on which I was working is still fully functional and no demons from the Dark Dimensions were summoned accidentally in the process. With that success, I can relax and enjoy the remaining hours of Labor Day vacation. Accomplishment sets the mind at ease like nothing else…