Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

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Reactor
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Re: Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

Post by Reactor »

Rachael wrote:What's so scary about the computer opening a chat session with you?
Heh :D the only thing I can think about is the poor user looks on the impatiently blinking cursor, then thinks to himself: "Eek! What does this thing want from me!?"
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Re: Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

Post by Wiw »

I guess the idea of working in an empty void is kind of creepy, but nothing majorly disturbing.
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Re: Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

Post by spoone »

Wiw wrote:I guess the idea of working in an empty void is kind of creepy, but nothing majorly disturbing.
I think that's what it is. But also again think about it after you're playing a game like Doom,Blood or Quake and you went back to a screen with a few things here and there,but rest of it was just black.
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Re: Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

Post by Enjay »

Persons of a nervous disposition should not open the following spoiler...
Spoiler:
:P
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Re: Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

Post by Arctangent »

that is a very displeased angel
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Re: Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

Post by scalliano »

Not creepy, so much as lonely, although that can be said for pretty much all non-GUI bootup routines of that era.
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Re: Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

Post by joe-ilya »

C:\>BOO.EXE
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Re: Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

Post by wildweasel »

joe-ilya wrote:C:\>BOO.EXE
I'm suddenly reminded of a handful of old DOS "toys" like this one that pretends your floppy drive is flooded.
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Re: Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

Post by cambertian »

DOS itself isn't scary, but you could probably make a really good horror game based off of it. I've kicked around this idea in my head of a DOS-based game with unsettling aesthetics that has purposefully undocumented command line arguments that reveal a story the deeper you dig, for instance.
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Re: Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

Post by Reactor »

wildweasel wrote:I'm suddenly reminded of a handful of old DOS "toys" like this one that pretends your floppy drive is flooded.
Heh :D the good old days where I wrote BAT files with faux error messages "Data error reading drive C" and shit, and the whole family bought it. Ahhhh, the god ol'days gone by...I miss them...
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Re: Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

Post by Enjay »

wildweasel wrote:I'm suddenly reminded of a handful of old DOS "toys" like this one that pretends your floppy drive is flooded.
Ahh, the good old days. There were loads of little toys like that. Good fun stuff. Love the spelling of "Standbye". :lol:
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Re: Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

Post by ibm5155 »

DOS had the creepiest virus tbh
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Re: Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

Post by Rachael »

Well - DOS ran in real mode - which meant 100% unfettered access to your *entire* *system*... so yeah, viruses had the potential to be extremely dangerous.

All modern OS's jail applications into their own space and are required to use an API in order to access the memory of other applications (which in some cases, may be blocked).
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Re: Did you ever think DOS was creepy looking back?

Post by Matt »

Rachael wrote:Well - DOS ran in real mode - which meant 100% unfettered access to your *entire* *system*... so yeah, viruses had the potential to be extremely dangerous.
That was part of the creepy for me, now that I think about it... my first exposures were to those floppy-driven computers that didn't really save anything and then the nerfed Mac GUI they had in elementary school, so between the low-tech display and the stark monochrome, and having learned the hard way the ways in which one can really screw up an entire folder with no protection (installed a game that let me put a space into the folder name), it always intuitively felt like going into the Deep Guts of the thing...
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