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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

It was pretty common for people to need different autoexec.bat configurations even just amongst gamers.

I had an elaborate batch-file based scheme for swapping in different versions of both autoexec.bat and config.sys, depending on what I needed/wanted to do.

It sucked.

I think newer versions of config.sys (relatively speaking) had a menu system that greatly simplified that. It would set some environment variable to let autoexec.bat jump to the correct section too, I believe.

Ah, Wikipedia says it's since MS-DOS 6.

I don't even remember that -- but I suspect it's because by the time Win 3 was a Thing, I was working in it almost exclusively and had little need for DOS-based things. I'm not sure I ever ran DOS > about v 5.

Ha, me too. And although I do look back on those days with rose-colored glasses… it did kind of suck having to futz with that stuff just to get a game to load.

The hardware sucked too! IRQ conflicts and changing jumpers! And better not close the case before you verified the new settings. :-D

Yes, mostly because you were screwing around right at memory and other limits of the system. (And it was mostly games--at least for typical consumers.)

You're vastly understating just how commonly people would butt head with those limits though.

You're also forgetting just how painful it was setting up a working autoexec.bat file in the first place. Never mind having dedicated chunks of code for some games and not others (eg do I need a mouse in this game? that driver is incompatible with this other bit of software, etc), just discovering what precise string of characters in your autoexec.bat was required to load the damn driver could be downright cryptic at times.

DOS wasn't that great. We remember it with rose tinted glasses because that's what humans do. But DOS wasn't a particularly good operating system, even for its era.

Gaming on DOS, now that was fun. But I'd argue it was fun in spite of DOS rather than because of it

Once you get into games, especially beyond monochrome text-based or maybe CGA, you were already pushing the limits. DOS was an OS for essentially text-based office apps in the early 80s and it just got pushed well-beyond that over time. And, yes, it made getting it set up for anything that wasn't a lowest common denominator setup very challenging.

In which case you've basically described the vast majority of DOS's common use cases. So why even argue against my point?

Also there were plenty of text-based office apps that required their own dedicated autoexec.bat config too.

Pulls up a recent LGR Video... watches griping about various expanded vs. extended vs. whatever memory issues games have

Yeeeep seems canon.

Or sometimes more commonly, an AUTOEXEC.BAT that provided the user a menu for which "mode" they wanted to boot into. Imagine having to choose between loading mouse drivers, or loading sound drivers.

Then when networking started to be more common, choosing between loading an IP stack or pretty much anything else :)

> Or sometimes more commonly

You're describing the same thing I was :)

> Imagine having to choose between loading mouse drivers, or loading sound drivers.

Indeed. This is why I don't get when people look back to DOS and say "wasn't it great".

Also the hell of having to configure sound card drivers. The commands that needed to be entered precisely with no clue about why things don't work if they don't. You'd often end up spending hours, days or weeks just getting something simple working. And most people didn't have internet access then so you couldn't just look up the problem on Stack Overflow. People moan about Bash scripts being hard to parse, autoexec.bat was a thousand times worse to work with.

I had a batch file just to swap autoexec.bat and config.sys with *.bak counterparts depending on the game.

The best thing was, a reboot took 10-15 seconds, IIRC.

on a 486 or a pentium, i think it used to take longer before that.

Yep, for me it was those damn mouse drivers that took up so much of my ems memory.

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