Ready, steady, command line!
DOS prompt
The first thing you meet is the drive letter. C stands for your hard disk, A for the diskette drive. Other letters refer to further drives, like a CD-ROM
drive. You type in your commands where the cursor is flashing.
Are you sitting comfortably? Let us look at the two most important keys you will use when using a computer. The first is the return or Enter key. This ends all commands, which means it is used all the
time. The Enter key looks like this:
The other important key is the Backspace key, this deletes the character to the left of the cursor (which is our little blinking bar.)
drive letter (C: the harddisk) backslash type command here The backspace key sits above the Enter key.
Do you want to know what the time is? Write the command time at the DOS prompt, press Enter, and there is your answer. You can now either type in another time, or press Enter again if you are satisfied with the accuracy of your PC’s clock.
You can activate and edit the date in the same way.
In this case the command is date ↵ If you edit the date you should keep to the conventional method using two characters DD-MM-YY (day-month-year) – or MM-DD-YY on American machines. If the date is correct, then press Enter.
If you want to wipe the board clean – well, the screen in this case – then type cls ↵ and you will end up where you started.
A program is started by using its own special program command. For example, the command word ↵ starts the word processor Word (for DOS). Of course, for this to work the program must be installed on your computer.
dir ↵ is a very important command which will display which files are immediately available. If you want to see what is on a diskette, then put it in the drive and type a: ↵ The contents of the diskette are now read in. Then type in the dir ↵ command and you can see what the files on the
diskette are called.
⇒ Using Windows today means that you no longer have to learn these commands, but maybe you like controlling your machine in this way and
want to learn more about your computer.
Windows with colored symbols
Start-up logo in Windows 3.1
Simple and spartan, no, the operating system of an IBM compatible PC could not continue like that.
Even DOS users ought to be able to enjoy a comfortable user interface which made full use of symbols and pictures. A graphic user interface had to be the way forward. And so software developer Microsoft went to work to develop a special program for this purpose. In 1985 Windows was released, now world famous, but in contrast to the Mac’s operating system Windows was not an independent system. It was installed on top of DOS and still needed DOS commands. The first versions of Windows ran so slowly that very few people bought them, and as if that wasn’t enough, there were hardly any programs which could work together
with Windows, so of what use was a graphic user interface if there were no programs for it?
graphic user interface in Windows 3.1
It was first in 1990 that Microsoft broke into a larger market with Windows 3.0. Gradually it had begun to run stably, more surely and at an acceptable speed. In the meantime other programs: word processors (including ‘Word for Windows’),drawing programs etc. which used Windows had begun to appear. Windows 3.1, released in 1992 really started to sell, and a little later version 3.11, which could set up several computers in a network, appeared. In the meantime more and more programs were being written for Windows. Basic DOS began to lose popularity and finally colored symbols, buttons and folders appeared on a DOS computer’s screen. Already it became unthinkable to work without the practical mouse.
With Windows Microsoft immediately achieved a monopoly position, and today it is nearly impossible to find a computer which does not run it. The
‘old Windows’ was replaced by the even easier to use Windows 95/98. The idea of using the year number instead of a version number was a new
trend.
Today there are many computers which run perfectly well with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 or 3.11. This ‘old Windows’ is activated in DOS by using the win command (remembering to press Enter!) So let us compare DOS and Windows (Version 3.0). In the main the same applies for Windows 95/98, which we will look at later.
