Learning to love DOS

Hello. Do you find yourself balking at the DOS prompt? Does the sight of the inky black screen send you into paroxisms of anxiety? Are you a slave to the BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME message?

Good news: You're not alone. Help is at hand.

MS-DOS is the command line operating system which runs behind Windows 95/98/ME. Although Windows puts a pretty face on things, you need to know how to use DOS.

Why? Because when things go wrong, using DOS commands may be the only way to fix them. DOS is physically small and can be run from a bootable floppy disk. If you pursue computer networks further, you will find that aspects such as network log-in scripts use DOS and similar commands. You need to know how to work with them. If you're planning to move into programming, then a firm grounding in MS-DOS will give you some important basics.

Some people struggle with DOS at first because it's not very forgiving if you make a mistake and you have to type and spell commands correctly. The good news is that DOS follows a few basic rules and once you've learnt them, it's all pretty much the same after that. And DOS is quite powerful in its own quiet way. You can even create small DOS programs (batch files) which will run in Windows.

If you want to become the master of DOS as quickly as possible, then read on..