IJMC - Hmm, Something's Missing

This one take a bit to get going...then stops. It's kinda missing the 
last four-twenty major revisions (depending how you look at it...four 
major numbers...but 6.22 was a big revision over 6.21...it worked for 
instance...). Anyway, it's cute enough. Enjoy.                  -dave






   In the early days, different brands of computers used different
   operating systems, which meant that people switching from one computer
   to another would have to learn a completely new set of instructions.
   This was obviously inefficient, so in the early 1980s most major
   computer manufacturers agreed to stop forcing people to learn a bunch
   of different operating systems, and instead adopt a single, uniform,
   standardized operating system so absurdly non-intuitive that nobody
   could learn it. This system was called MS-DOS.

   The MS, of course, stood for Microsoft, the company that was started
   by the brilliant software genius Bill Gates. Gates is a very rich man
   today -- Forbes magazine estimates that he's worth more than the
   entire O.J. Simpson defense team combined -- and do you want to know
   why? The answer is one word: versions.

   To understand what I mean by versions, let's consider an analogy
   involving cars. Suppose you've purchased a new car, and you notice
   that, although it does move, it goes very slowly, is extremely hard to
   steer, and makes a loud scraping sound. You study this problem for a
   while, and you conclude that the most likely cause is that the car
   does not have any front wheels. So you mention this to the
   salesperson, and he tells you that you have Version 1.0 of the car,
   but that Version 1.1 will be out shortly, and it will feature wheels
   in front as well as back. So when Version 1.1 comes out, you upgrade,
   which means you pay money. But you're happy, because now you have a
   car with a complete set of wheels, and you're totally satisfied with
   it from the moment that you pull out of the dealer's lot to the
   moment, about 90 seconds later, when you drive into a public fountain.
   This is when find out that brakes are not scheduled to appear until
   Version 1.3.

   This is very much the way MS-DOS worked. The original version, 1.0,
   did virtually nothing except cause the computer screen to say:

     A:>

   That was it. Really. Ask anybody who used MS-DOS computers back then.
   You'd turn them on, and there'd be this A: staring back at you. What
   did it mean? Why A:? Why not some other letter, or even an actual
   word? And what was the little pointy > thing for? We will never know
   the answer. It's one of the many mysteries of MS-DOS.

   So, anyway, people would turn on their computers, and stare at the

     A:>

   for awhile, scratching their heads, and then finally they'd try typing
   something after the A:>, perhaps something like:

     A:> HELLO

   But here was the crucial thing about MS-DOS Version 1.0: No matter
   what you typed in, it would respond as follows:

    BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME

   Then, with no further explanation, it would go back to:

     A:>

   There were rumors -- never verified -- that if you typed in certain
   secret code words, you could get some response other than A:> or BAD
   COMMAND OR FILE NAME, but if there were such code words, only Bill
   Gates ever knew what they were. So mainly what this version of the
   MS-DOS was used for -- millions of person-hours were spent on this --
   was trying to get it to do something, anything. If you were to travel
   back in time and look at the average person's computer screen during
   that era, you'd see what looked like a conversation between the
   computer user and an unusually hostile employee of the Department of
   Motor Vehicles:

     A:> HELLO
     BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME

     A:> HELP
     BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME

     A:> DO SOMETHING!
     BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME

     A:> RUN A PROGRAM, DAMMIT!
     BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME

     A:>**** YOU
     BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME, ***HOLE

   This was pretty much all people did with MS-DOS Version 1.0. So you
   can imagine how excited everybody was when Microsoft came out with
   Version 1.1, which had a whole new capability. In addition to doing
   this:

     A:>

   It would sometimes also do this:

     C:>

   A new letter! This was very, very exciting news for those of us in the
   computer geek world. We all immediately upgraded to Version 1.1. Of
   course, no matter what we typed, it still answered BAD COMMAND OR FILE
   NAME. But we felt renewed hope.

   Over the next few years, Microsoft continued to come out with new
   improved, versions of MS-DOS, featuring a constantly expanding
   repertoire of incomprehensible and/or scary screen messages,
   including:

     B:>
     NON-SYSTEM DISK OR DISK ERROR
     INVALID SWITCH
     PATH NOT FOUND
     WARNING! ALL DATA WILL BE LOST!

   And just about everybody's all-time favorite:

     ABORT, RETRY, FAIL?

   We loyal Microgeeks faithfully upgraded every time a new version came
   out, until finally, somewhere around Version 3.7, we had reached the
   point where we could use MS-DOS to actually run programs on our
   computers, and Bill Gates had reached the point where he had
   approximately 217 personal jet airplanes.