The Command Prompt

Ever since I had a computer, I was typing in commands. I travelled from the Commodore64 system to the Microsoft DOS platform and eventually became lost in the user interface of Microsoft Windows. Commands were soley to run games, start Windows, and change directories. When the MS-DOS command prompt came up one could type:

win

and Windows 3 would start up. When changing directories, there would be tons of files that may or may not make sense to children but I knew that if I messed with the right stuff and typed in the right commands, I could master the filesystem.

I recently recorded a song that started out as an ode to free software and filesystems. After the first thirty seconds or so it was more of an experiment with changing the automatic tuning of my vocals, harmonizing with myself and playing around with simple digital instrument sequencing. There is a lot of pop in the mix, but it wouldn't have ever happened without Linux.

mynight.mp3

 mp3 at http://clarksvegas.com/daniel/mynight.mp3 if flash is not available, which I understand.

Windows 95 had come out and many communities were starting to get on the internet. I had a good friend named Andrew that was into video games, amateur radio and building lasers. He got his first computer after we started hanging out and within a year he was running Slackware Linux and had convinced his parents (We were eleven years old) to buy him an additional laptop so he could network them together in his room and share the dial-up internet between the two systems. It was ridiculous! I remember him showing me a lot of commands and interactivity within the shell, but I didn't really grasp what was going on with those small white words on black screens until years later. What a useful thing the command prompt can be. I'm glad I was introduced to it so early on, but I don't know how kids these days feel about typing in commands (unless it is a part of hacking of modifying some cool new electronic device) to their computers, let alone their portable communication device.

Flash audio player from http://wpaudioplayer.com.
Slackware Linux mascot from Wikipedia.

From Commodore

My father taught me immediately to become inquisitive about things and had readily available modern computing systems that could be used primarily for gaming, but also for simple programming, but mostly fiddling. The best thing you could do second to playing games was copying games and this could be done with two five-and-a-quarter inch floppy drives. Have you ever seen a "real" floppy disk? They're not the ones that are covered with mostly inflexible hard plastic, but you can bend them like a frisbee and they're as big as and adult's hand! Yeah, those. Pop in a disk. It was household knowledge that to play games all you had to do was fire it up and type

LOAD "*",8,1

into this bad boy:

It'd say

READY

and you'd shout

RUN

The game was going while the joystick(s) were out and everyone was having a great time. I played games with my sister, neighbors, mom and dad. It was phenomenal! Most of the games at my household were single player adventure or turn-based strategy games. I never really got a lot of the great arcade classics, but I did have this beach volleyball game, a car racing game, and this space arcade shooter cartridge game that George Lucas had a part in. My dad had a pretty classic setup with a Commodore64 with a generic Zenith monitor/television, a couple of floppy drives. I loved using the computer. Whenever dad wasn't on that thing, I know I was. It was phenomenal. It wasn't just about games. Sometimes I'd enter the wrong command and I'd get a listing of all these files. I had no idea what a file was but I just wanted to play the game.

Dad ended up getting a new C128 for himself with a matching monitor and we shared the two floppy drives in the household, because only seldom did one need to copy that floppy. He told my sister and I that we could share the other one, but all of those games for that computer were likely made by men for men and although my sister posed some interest, I was on that thing all day. It was my first computer. The monitor could be switched to television with the click of a button and I could watch excellent VHS programming involving mutant turtles and then click that button and fire up some disk that takes forever to load and shows these awesome demos of seemingly excellent video games. It was the life.

*Image of animated Commodore64 command prompt originally located at the Greater Pittsburg Vintage Computer Museum website at http://www.myoldcomputers.com ran by Randolph Byrnes. Verbal permission to use image was granted by his daughter.