OT: A bit of the Geek

A commerical I saw today about Command strips and the web site:

command.com

Picture hangers? I don't get the geek tony.

I get it. I've been playing with computers since the DOS day. Command.com was a major file in the operating system.

Command.com is the command line interpeter. Meaning when you typed in a command, that file figured out what you ment and started the particular instruction.

I've been using computers since before DOS, but I've yet to get around to using DOS. I guess it's a bit late now.

When I took my intro to computers class we had to write a batch file using DOS. Which you can get for free. Kay, I remember the days before DOS as well. Although the kids today wouldn't believe what it took to add a hard drive to the system back then, all 10 Mb of it....

First you need several thousand dollars...

Mine was $700 for my Tandy computer. I thought I would NEVER use all of that storage. I thought 16K was huge until I programmed my book collection, it took up about 48K.

Oh, don't forget those unreal tape drives.

AND......

I actually programmed using paper tape at work!

I once wrote a program that would allow you to type in a sentence and it would punch it out on paper tape to where you could hold up the tape and read the sentence in block letters. The 4K of memory was not enough to hold the program with the data for the translation tables, so I'd have to load the program with one tape, then load the data with another tape, before running it. I think I still have some of my old paper tapes around somewhere, but nothing to read them anymore (other than the ones I can hold up to the light and read).

When I was in the Air Force, we had a computer that used paper tape to load the computer program up until the 1990's. Hell, since it's a one of a kind machine, they may still be using it today.