New Operating System

[latexman]

It wasn't off a mainframe, but I remember playing a Star Trek game from a friend's Atari home system circa 1979-1980. It was written in Basic, and my friend changed a few lines of code to make the game more difficult. I think it got loaded from a cassette tape, a common method when floppy disk drives were not yet standard.

The main (and fun) part of the game was when the Enterprise entered a grid (a sector in a galaxy) with multiple Klingon ships to battle against. Am I describing the game you mentioned?

Yes, sounds similar, but that was a lonnnnng time ago.

 

[MRG]

Ditto. Freshman year, 1975, NCSU (Go Pack), ChE 205 (the notorius ChE "weeder" class with a Fortran IV lab).



The bright side that semester was, we got a grad student's TSO account and password and we played "Star Trek" every chance we got!



Anyone else play Star Trek off a mainframe?

Played some version asteroids? on an S/370 in 1984. It wasn't particularly entertaining, I had more fun playing with control blocks and what was hidden within.

 

[Car-Guy]

We still use DOS.

Really? If you don't mind me asking, what for?

I think he was joking....However, if you want, you can still get to a DOS command prompt even using Windows 11. (Just did it)

 

[Tuirc]

He misremembered, or installed Mosiac himself. Win95 came with Internet Explorer 3.0. IE 4.0 was disastrously added as an upgrade a year later.

In contrast to the OP, I bought my first computer in 1985 at the Post Exchange in Schweinfurt, West Germany. It was a Commodore 128. I later added a floppy drive, printer and 1200 baud modem. That rig took me through the Army and through college. (128 referred to the amount of RAM 128 Kb not Mb or Gb). A in 1992 I got my first “real” computer, a 486 33 MHz, 4 Mb RAM, 120 Mb hard disk, 28.8 Modem and a single speed CDROM. I was a stickler for modem speed as I’d been connecting to online services since 1987 (QLink) I booked my first flight online in 1988 through a QLink connection to the SABRE booking system. My 28.8 modem was so fast at the time that I had practically nothing I could connect to at that speed. LOL. It was years before AOL would have an array of modems at that speed.

 

[scrabbler1]

The last time I used a DOS prompt was back in 2016. My hard drive was failing, and the best I could do was to insert my W10 thumb drive which had some recovery program to allow me to get to a DOS prompt and no further (Windows wouldn't start).

Getting to a DOS prompt did allow me to find the directories on some X:/ drive which contained my personal files, such as in Excel and Word. I was able to back up my recently used files (I had done a backup a few weeks earlier, so there weren't too many I had to save) onto another thumb drive. I lost a few emails I had recently received, but otherwise everything else was intact when I replaced the HD and reloaded everything anew.

Remembering how to navigate through DOS was a crucial part toward not losing any files.