Anyone else remember DOS?
While I was in college this past time (circa 2002) I worked in a QC lab as an assistant engineer. I did my best to ignore the fact that most of the people I was working under were either my age or younger- probably helps a bit that I don't look like I'm as old as I am, but it was still a bit shocking at times.

One of the pieces of testing equipment ran on an old 8088 with DOS 5 for an operating system. As it had been in use for about twenty years at that point, it was full of dust and generally getting pretty ragged. But none of the IT guys wanted to touch it and no one else knew anything about that computer, so it just kept wheezing along.

Then came the day it died. Much panic ensued, as no one had any idea where the installation disks were- hell, they would have been 5.25" floppies anyway. What to do, what to do?

I powered it down, then lifted the case a couple of inches off the desk and let it drop. I turned on the power and it came back to life. There was much rejoicing.

"Got any blank floppies?" I asked.

"Yes. Why?"

"Because I can find the program files and copy them and make a disk for you."

Blank looks from a row of engineers. "Can you do that?"

I looked at them for a second. "Yes, this is DOS, not windows. Find me a floppy and a new computer to hook it to and I'll get it running again."

Two hours later I had the program installed onto a Windows 2000 machine, running under a DOS shell. (It only took that long because they had to come up with disks and a computer.) They all thought I was some sort of computer guru after that. I thought they were a poor excuse for engineers- they used the same machines I did, at the same time I did.

Twits.

A few years later I'm working for a company that designed ethanol facilities to take advantage of the new green energy craze. One day my boss tells me to take all of the files from one project on the server, copy them to a new folder, then go through and rename each one from "100MGD" to "50MGD", as we were basically going to use the one project as the basis for the other. "There, that should keep you busy for at least an hour," he laughed.

"Really? Got a sec? Let me show you something." I brought up a DOS shell, typed in the path to the newly copied files and typed in ren 100MGD*.* 50MGD*.* and hit return. A wall of text flashed up the screen for a moment, then I got my command prompt back. I exited the shell, then opened the folder in Windows Explorer and showed him the result- all of the files renamed as requested.. "Okay, what next?"

His jaw dropped. "How the fuck did you do that?!?"

I grinned at him. "Dude, be thankful that I didn't go to the root directory and type in del *.xls /s. That would have wiped out every spreadsheet on that network drive."

He looked pale at the thought. "Okay, don't ever show that to anyone else here, understand? You have any idea what they would say if they knew you could do that?"

I snorted. "I just can't believe that they don't already know. We only stopped using DOS ten years ago. What happened to all the people who knew how to run it?" I laughed and started singing, "Damn it feels good to be a DOS geek..."

He shook his head and left.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Wed 30 Sep 2009, 3:02, 7 replies)

A click
Because I remember DOS. I was, in fact, very proud when I got a (possibly less-than-legitimate) copy of DOS 6.2 running on my old 486 back in the day.

It's a wonder people don't still use it more often than they do. But then I suppose people who miss terminals that much have mostly moved over to Linux in despair...
(LongJohnBaldry, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 10:08, closed)

Linux
Everyone where I work runs linux to admin linux servers. It's ace.

sed, awk and grep are fantastic. It takes me about 15 seconds on the command line to turn, say, a log file into a CSV file containing only the fields I'm interested in. Another minute or so (again on the command line) to make a graph and push it to a web server for someone to look over.

People really do underestimate how powerful the command line is. Sure, it probably takes a good few hundred hours to learn how to use it properly but you can get the basics within 5-10 hours and save yourself tons of time in the long run.

Have a look at:
www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes

For some examples.

For the geeks: Oh, yes, GNU, etc. blah blah blah
(Toucan - http://www.titmonday.com, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 10:55, closed)

Quite right too.
Vista was the final push for me to move completely over to Linux.

I still use DOS at work (where I have no choice but to use windows) for things mention in the OP - batch renaming of files, quick searching etc...(I simply cannot work out how to make that search thing in Vista actually search - too many times have I used it to search for something and it to come back as say 'no files found', then do a "dir /s *.doc" or whatever, and viola! there's the file I was looking for.

Although I got caught out too many times typing "ls -l" so I put a batch file "ls.bat" in the path ;-)
(dchurch bah, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 13:53, closed)

You may be a fan of
cygwin.

It's a horrible, horrible hack, but if you have to use it then you have to use it. Gives you all the good GNU stuff under Windows.
(Toucan - http://www.titmonday.com, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 13:57, closed)

I have
toyed with cygwin, but I could never get it installed using my Vista box. Constant errors for some reason. I gave up - this was an early(ish) version of Vista though, so I may try again.
(dchurch bah, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 14:03, closed)

8088?
I remember those badgers, had a 10mb drive if I remember correctly, we used to run Lotus 123 on it and found that it burned in the screen after a number of years :) I think we were on dos 3.1 at the time, a nice version and wasn't up its own arse.
(SpangoTheWonderBadger is brewing beer, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 12:08, closed)

I'm a Windows admin by trade
And when I have to do admin-type stuff as part of my job, I typically do it on the command line. It's so much easier and quicker to knock up a script to do something menial and repetitive than it is to use the GUI. Windows NT Shell Scripting is one of the most useful books I've ever read.

Microsoft published the Resource Kit tools for a reason. Sysinternals tools are also available for a reason. Download them and learn how to fucking use them. Hell, learn how to use the built-in command line tools. I have no patience with any Windows admins who don't use the command line. They're the fuckwits that give the rest of us a bad name.

But then, I cut my teeth on MS-DOS 3.2 and DEBUG, so the command line has never held any fears for me.
( flake has nothing against your right leg, Wed 30 Sep 2009, 17:55, closed)