Some Days I Feel Older Than Others

[Belinda Barfield]

Some of you computer savvy guys will probably get a laugh from this. Our business neighbor across the street recently sold his business to a much larger company. His daughter works in the office. For the past two weeks she has been in training for the new company's procedures, accounting, etc. She has been in tears for the better part of the training because she is having to learn DOS. She's young and had never even heard of DOS. I, on the other hand, remember IBM Selectric typewriters and taking short hand in high school. The times, they are a changin'.

[Bill Edwards(2)]

DOS? Really? Wonder if they're using WordStar for word processing?

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Sounds like things are coming "full circle"......LOL!

[Keith Outten]

PC DOS or MS DOS?

I think I still have PC DOS version 2.0 disks around here somewhere but I'm positive I don't have a single sided 360k drive that would read the disc.
I also have a Windows 3.1 operating system if anyone needs it.

The first computer that Jackie and I purchased used a tape drive to store and load basic programs, no floppy discs then.
Our second machine had a 360k disc drive.
Our third machine had a 5 meg hard drive.........
Yep, I'm feeling a bit old myself today
.

[Ryan Mooney]

Could be DR Dos

I remember using tapes on the Apple I (II?) fast forward to the counter where the program was... oops to far!

[Val Kosmider]

DOS? Really? Wonder if they're using WordStar for word processing?

Perhaps...and then they will move to Wang Word Processors.

Why in the world, i wonder, is anyone having to 'learn' DOS at this point. I know there is a BUNCH of old code that is written that way, but aren't those times changing too?

What's next? Batch processing?

[Kevin Bourque]

I remember writing on papyrus with peacock quills.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

The first computer I bought for use at home was a "Timex" IIRC. No external storage...tape or disk drive. You had to enter the program in manually.

Meanwhile at work, I had already written diagnostic software for Dec-PDP-11 and for Floating Point array processors. Some purchasing officer got a really good deal. He got a good contract price on the array processors but didn't negotiate the support or diagnostic software into the deal. Duh!

[David Helm]

I'm captured by the fact that you remember the IBM Selectric. Since I learned to type on a manual (no electricity even) typewriter, when the Selectrics came out they were the most fantastic thing in the universe. Old is certainly a relative term!

[Moses Yoder]

I thought everything was still being programmed in Basic?

[Mel Fulks]

Doesn't seem like a good way to run a business . But just a couple of years ago I heard a story on NPR about old Computor software still being used by Feds . Some people with IRS had been asked to stay on because the current computor geniuses could not work the old stuff.

[Jerome Stanek]

Is it DOS or UNX My daughter has to know UNIX for her job and her boyfriend uses it all the time for his job. One works for a bank and the other a software company

[Steve Meliza]

A large company using DOS as part of its accounting doesn't seem likely. What is more likely is that they are using a Unix or Linux command line interface as that is what DOS is/was so a novice would think of them as being the same. At work I use the occasional graphical program, but right now I have 12 command line terminals open on a Linux system which is where I get all of my work done. Sometimes I might have as many as 20 open and many of those in use at the same time so that I can take advantage of the 12 CPU cores and 100GB of RAM.

[Brian Elfert]

I'm guessing rather than using DOS they are really using a program that runs in old fashioned text mode like a terminal. I can't imagine with Y2K and everything since then that anyone is really still running MS DOS or PC DOS as their operating system. (I guess there was a Y2K compatible version of PC DOS.)

One of my friends worked for a small company that was bought out by a larger company. One of the first things the larger company did was lay off the IT staff at the smaller company. The bad thing was none of the IT functions had been transferred to the larger company. When someone at the small company called the new help desk nobody at the larger company's IT dept had any clue how the IT stuff at the small company worked.

[Joe Angrisani]

I remember writing on papyrus with peacock quills.

You had papyrus?? Lucky dog.