For better, and for worse, technology is ubiquitous. It’s so leviathanic and woven into modern life that to note it’s ubiquity is to state the obvious and risk losing the interest of readers. Internet access has essentially become a utility, like water or electricity; core to the healthy functioning of humans in society. Technology’s omnipresence also means that tech literacy has become a necessary life skill. Perhaps that has always been the case to some degree, even in pre-computer eras, but now it is especially so. I got lucky in this regard.
When I was 6 or 7 years old, back in the late 1980’s, my parents bought an at-the-time-modern desktop computer. It had a 286 processor, 3.5" & 5.25" disk drives, and a [likely heavily radioactive] monitor. There was no Microsoft Windows. Everything was MS-DOS (command line!). There were no mouse-intensive programs on our computer, except Paintbrush (a.k.a. MS Paint), which was/still-is a great piece of software. The command line wasn’t considered special. It was just the way things were done. Simple operations involved navigating through labyrinthine folder structures with a keyboard, and it required typing error-free commands to accomplish anything. I think everything was running with full administrator rights, so either my brother or I could’ve easily slipped up and melted everything down. Yet, somehow that never happened.
I spent countless hours two-finger typing stories, drawing low-quality cartoons in Paintbrush, and playing Test Drive v1.0 (a game I proudly beat with a keyboard), and several other pirated games that I can’t remember the names of. As a kid, I could not have anticipated that learning MS-DOS commands, file & folder structures, and gaining general computer literacy would have any long term applications or value. I didn’t have any real grasp on what I was doing. I was mostly just having fun making up stories and drawing pictures to entertain myself; two activities that I still enjoy.
When Windows arrived and conquered the arena of personal computers’ user interfaces, command line activities faded into the background; considered an outmoded means by many folks, and extinct to others. Personally, I switched to Windows-based Paint and WordPerfect for a while (Side note: ‘WordPerfect’ was caught by the spell checker in LinkedIn). The need for MS-DOS skills rarely surfaced. I forgot about MS-DOS, and quietly filed away the skill set somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind; along with a landfill of other seemingly useless skills I had developed and abandoned.
We often talk about the circular path we’ve taken from centralized mainframes to local machines, and then back to centralized computing in the cloud. Following along a similar path, Information Technology Administrator user interfaces began at the command line, then morphed somewhat into mouse-click-driven Graphical User Interface (GUI’s), and are now rapidly moving back to the realm of command-line interfaces (CLI’s) and code/scripting. In recent years, the command line experience of my childhood has proved to be professionally invaluable in the field of Information Technology. I still use some MS-DOS commands on a daily basis. And although most of the commands I type these days are PowerShell, in a general sense it’s all very similar.
The long term effects of my early-life tech experience had an immensely positive impact on my life in the decades that followed, and like most things I’ve learned, I was oblivious at the time. This is often the case with the things we learn; absorbing knowledge, building skills, etc. Wherever we are, or whatever we are doing, if we are continually learning, the learned lessons often pay dividends in the distant, unforeseeable future. I don’t think it’s for a deep, meaningful purpose. It’s just how life works. And, if you learned & recall your MS-DOS commands, you can still use them.
