Art Of Geek » DOS http://artofgeek.com Technology from the geek perspective. Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:48:30 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc I feel so dirty… http://artofgeek.com/2008/02/27/i-feel-so-dirty/ http://artofgeek.com/2008/02/27/i-feel-so-dirty/#comments Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:49:15 +0000 madgunde http://artofgeek.com/2008/02/27/i-feel-so-dirty/ Today at work I had to make a DOS boot disk so I could secure erase the hard disk in a really old PC before it got disposed of. I had to call upon knowledge and experience I haven’t used in years and that I’d rather hoped I would never have to again. [...]]]> MS-DOS NightmareToday at work I had to make a DOS boot disk so I could secure erase the hard disk in a really old PC before it got disposed of. I had to call upon knowledge and experience I haven’t used in years and that I’d rather hoped I would never have to again. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say, what should have been a 5 minute operation ended up wasting over an hour and a half of my time between a bad floppy disk, incorrect instructions I was given and stupidly bad source files for the scrubber utility that included a misnamed program file. So after overcoming all the other obstacles, I still had to figure out why I was getting a “bad command or filename” error in the middle of what was supposed to be an automated process.

It was really surreal, and took me back to a dark time in my life when I had to deal with those kinds of problems on a daily basis. A time I never want to have to revisit again. I feel so dirty. I’m going to have to spend an extra amount of time using my Mac to try and cleanse me of this disgusting feeling.

It amazes me that PCs still ship with floppy drives in them to this day. Apple’s first floppy drive-less computer, the original iMac will celebrate it’s 10 year anniversary this year. It’s been over 9 years since Apple dropped the 3.5″ floppy drive from all it’s products. Really punctuates the Windows PC industry’s bizarre obsession with outdated technologies, doesn’t it?

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