MSDOS

MSDOS is great.  MSDOS stands for MicroSoft Disk Operating System.  And that is exactly what it is.  Over the years a majority of people have moved away from running MSDOS on their desktop PC's.  To be honest I don't blame them at all.  Its bleak, its black, its command line driven and hard to use.  However in my option it was the only 100% stable operating system Microsoft ever wrote.  I know its not all their fault as lots of problems are caused by drivers and third party applications but its true.  DOS is great because it does what its told, nothing more and nothing less.

When Windows 95 was released everyone said where DOS gone?  Well it didn't go anywhere.  On early machines Windows was an extra so DOS and Windows were sold as two separate packages,  you could make your machine boot automatically into Windows by putting the entry "win" in the Autoexec.bat..  

By the time Windows 95 was released most machines running DOS were also running Windows and applications were all moving to Windows.  The two became integrated together and improved and sold as Windows 95.  In fact all the Windows 9x and ME versions of Windows are still DOS based.  By this I don't mean they are command line driven operating systems, I mean that DOS is still the underlying operating system with Windows running on top.  This means you can still use DOS to do things like fix problems with your PC if you can't get into Windows to sort them out as is often the case.

This being the case DOS is still worth learning even today.

What are Batch Files

Batch files are just a list of DOS commands executed in order with a few additional statements that you can use to wait for user input and jump to certain sections in the file.  Windows based servers still use these in the form of a login script which is run every time you log into the network.  If you are a network administrator DOS can be very useful to automate commands such as drive mappings, setting the time on the workstation or deleting temporary files as well as many other things.

How to boot to DOS on Windows 9x

If you boot a Windows 9x machine and just before you see the Windows loading screen (Splash Screen) hold down F8 on the keyboard you will be presented with a menu where you can choose to go to Windows or DOS (Command Prompt Only).  If you select command prompt only your machine boot normally but does not run the file win.com which starts Windows.  From this prompt you can do almost everything you could with MSDOS.

What is the Config.sys & Autoexec.bat

When your machine starts up it processes the Config.sys file followed by the Autoexec.bat file.  These files contain a list of commands which are executed every time you start the machine.  Typical things in these files are drivers for mice and CD-ROM's as well as keyboard drivers and language information.  With Windows 9x win.com is automatically ran after the Autoexec.bat.  This can be turned off by editing the file C:\MSDOS.SYS file and changing the Boot GUI= from 1 to 0.

DOS Commands

attrib

delete / del / erase

copy

rd

mkdir / md

cd

xcopy

fc

edit

rename / ren

chkdsk

dir

prompt

time

date

label

deltree

net (use / time)

ipconfig

type

| more

fdisk

format

sys

subst

mem

diskcopy

find