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Or sometimes more commonly, an AUTOEXEC.BAT that provided the user a menu for which "mode" they wanted to boot into. Imagine having to choose between loading mo

by brk 5y ago

Or sometimes more commonly, an AUTOEXEC.BAT that provided the user a menu for which "mode" they wanted to boot into. Imagine having to choose between loading mouse drivers, or loading sound drivers. Then when networking started to be more common, choosing between loading an IP stack or pretty much anything else :)

hnlmorg 5y ago
> Or sometimes more commonly You're describing the same thing I was :) > Imagine having to choose between loading mouse drivers, or loading sound drivers. Indeed. This is why I don't get when people look back to DOS and say "wasn't it great". Also the hell of having to configure sound card drivers. The commands that needed to be entered precisely with no clue about why things don't work if they don't. You'd often end up spending hours, days or weeks just getting something simple working. And most people didn't have internet access then so you couldn't just look up the problem on Stack Overflow. People moan about Bash scripts being hard to parse, autoexec.bat was a thousand times worse to work with.