PC Maintenance Class 10: Term 2

Tonights session was based on the command line , or command prompt. Before Windows was on our computers, the MS-DOS environment was all we had. Our computers and the commands and fuctions it uses were what we class today as ‘command driven’.

MS-DOS (short for Micro Soft Disk Operating System) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating systems offering a graphical user interface (GUI), in particular by various generations of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

MS-DOS grew from a 1981 request by IBM for an operating system for its IBM PC range of personal computers. Microsoft quickly bought the rights to QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), also known as86-DOS, from Seattle Computer Products, and began work on modifying it to meet IBM's specification. The first edition, MS-DOS 1.0, was launched in 1982. The version shipped with IBM's PCs was called PC DOS. Although MS-DOS and PC-DOS were initially developed in parallel by Microsoft and IBM, the two products eventually went their separate ways.

During its life, several competing products were released for the x86 platform, and MS-DOS itself would go through eight versions, until development ceased in 2000. Ultimately it was the key product in Microsoft's growth from a programming languages  company to a diverse software development firm, providing the company with essential revenue and marketing resources. It was also the underlying basic operating system on which early versions of Windows ran as a GUI.

 

Here is a typical screen shot of a computer running MS-DOS.  Not much to look at really:

The above screen shot shows MS-DOS version 3.3 and it is a directory listing of a floppy disk in the computers drive A:

I introduced the class to the concept of using “wildcards” in MS-DOS, and how they can still be used today in the search functions and capabilities of Windows XP,  Vista and 7.

Wildcards are characters that can be used to stand-in for unknown
characters in file names. In card games, a wildcard is a card that can match
up with any other cards. In DOS, wildcard characters can match up with any character
that is allowable in a file name.

The asterisk character, *, can stand in for any number of characters.
Some examples of this command:

c:\>del *.doc

This command would delete every file with the doc extension
from the root directory of C: . So files like myfile.doc, testfile.doc, and
123.doc would all be deleted.

C:\>copy ab*.txt a:

This command would copy every file that began with ab,
and had an extension of txt, to the floppy drive A: . So files like abstract.txt,
abalone.txt, and abba.txt would all be copied.

C:\temp\>del *.*

This is the fastest way to clean out a directory. This command
will delete every file in the directory C:\temp\. The first apostrophe covers
every filename, and the second one covers every extension.

For some substantial information on using Wildcards in Windows search, click this link.