In the High and Far-Off Times, the PC, O Best Beloved, had no mouse. It had only a Keyboard… I can’t keep up with Kipling but you get the idea. This was aeons ago. This was the age of Dos when today’s careless texters and wilful misspellers would have been required to bend the knee to the computer’s rigours rather than the other way round.Say you had a file called Teacup in a folder called Saucer and you wanted to copy it to another folder called Milkjug. On a blank screen devoid of pretty icons you typed something (age has affected my memory) like this:
C/>: copy: /Saucer/Teacup/: /Milkjug/
And if you didn’t get it exactly right nothing happened.
Windows plus a mouse meant any fool could drag and drop but the advantages weren’t immediately apparent. When told about Word for Windows I remember asking: why complicate a typing procedure by breaking off to use a mouse?
A computer running on Dos was like an Austin 7. Repairs and maintenance were within anyone’s grasp. You could tinker with the central cortex by rearranging the autoexec/bat file, causing the PC to boot up differently. You could penetrate the hard disk and alter the way programs appeared on the screen.
My favourite game was Columns, a childish version of Tetris. When I changed to a slightly faster computer I realised I would never match my earlier scores because Columns too was now faster. So I found the score box on the hard disk, deleted the old figures and started again. I was Master of the Universe.
But it didn’t last.
