DosQueen

Dear Morgan,

I was looking for a photo file yesterday, which I happened to know was on my OLD desktop computer. It’s actually not THAT old, but it’s older than my laptop and much much slower. Anyway – it had been a while since I had turned it on, and it made loud groaning noises as it came to life. Then it had about 12 windoze updates to run, and it carried on grinding away for ages before it restarted.   That took a good hour!!   Finally, I could get on it and do something.  I immediately started getting rid of software I no longer used. But even that took me a while to work out. My laptop has Windows 7. I thought I’d never get used to it, but used to it I did, very fast. The old desktop has XP on it. Believe me, going back is harder than going forward!

I started cleaning up the icons on the desktop – and guess what I found. MSDos! MSDos!   Man – I hadn’t seen that for so long. Then I remembered my nickname at work a long time ago was DosQueen. Now that’s going back quite some time – to about 1988 or 1989.  I don’t think we had Windoze back then – in fact, I can’t remember what we had. All I do remember is that I paid $5000 for a 286. Yep! $5000 for a 286. I wonder if they’re worth that much now for antique collectors. When I think about it, I was probably really ripped off! The monitor was orange and black. No colour. Well – not like they are now. Everything was done from DOS – we started our programs up by typing in the name of the exe file to start it. Very weird.

Burglars did me a favour back then. They came into my place one night when I was away down in Whitianga, and stole everything. The computer, printers, backups, fax,TV, stereo. Everything. Fortunately I had replacement insurance. 286’s were no longer available, so it was replaced with the faster 486 complete with… Windoze 95 Can you imagine that? And I had a colour monitor this time. Amazing. I don’t even remember what Win 95 was like. I think that computer had something like a 4mb hard disk drive. 4mb! Do you know – my camera takes one photograph, and i’ts double that size. Oh yeah – and we had floppy disks. Disks that were 5.25 in and flopped. I haven’t seen one of those for ages. I wonder if anyone ever uses them now?

My next computer was a faster one –  a Pentium II – and it had a 40mb HDD. Oh – I thought I had such a lot of space compared to my 4mb. I can’t remember what it was, but it boasted Windows 3.1 However, I had never got used to windows explorer and I still used DOS whenever I had to copy files, or rename them, or move them etc.. I prefered to be in control – I hated Windows being in control. Moving into the 2000’s I upgraded again and got a computer with… 20Gb hard disk drive. Wow – you would think I had plenty, but no matter how often I upgraded, I always ended up getting low in hard disk space, and no matter how long I had my computers, and regardless of keeping everything up to date, they always got slower and slower! I’ve only had one Hard Disk Crash, with my last computer, and fortunately I lost nothing of consequence.

Going back to this old desktop with XP on it that I had up and going yesterday. It still has 39GB hard disk space left so I’m not running out of space. I found I could still use DOS – hadn’t forgotten about it at all, and still prefer it.

But I wonder – what will be our computers in 20 years time, considering in the last 20 years, they’ve gone through huge transformations in size, capacity, speed and price fluctuations. Desktops are now cheap as chips, and laptops are where you pick up the $5000 price tags. And where will Windows go? I hope it will be able to bring us breakfast and bed, and make coffee for us all day at the touch of the button or in DOS…

c:\>coffee.bat white nosugar

c:\>11012 changes made coffee in DVD drive please remove.

Maybe I should keep my current desktop for 50 years – it might eventually be worth something!

Oh – and while I did all that, I completely forgot to look for the file I was looking for, and was the original reason for starting it up.  Sigh.  I think my brain needs  a new memory chip!

Cheers Robyn