The first computer I had was an 8088 XT clone with a turbo setting that went from 4.77 MHz to 8 MHz! It was blazing fast!
I remember the very first thing I did when we brought the computer home from the computer store was I went through the hard drive and saw this file that I couldn't possibly use, and deleted it. Why? Who knows, I was a dumb kid.
Yes, you guessed it. COMMAND.COM.
When I rebooted my computer, I got the "COULD NOT LOAD COMMAND.COM" error and I freaked out because I f'ed up my computer on the very first day I had it and my parents would kill me. I knew I could boot from my DOS 3.2.1 diskettes, but not from my hard drive, so after straining, I somehow managed to figure out how to copy the command.com from my diskette onto my hard drive and it worked.
And thus started my illustrious career in debugging computer problems and IT support, which continues to this day.
Have some similar memories myself. Definitely learned a lot from being a little too enthusiastic about modifying files/settings on the family computer.
What stands out for me is the period when I was still just a kid, albeit the "neighborhood computer kid". I'd inevitably get a call every few weeks from someone who lived nearby or was a friend of my parents. I'd go over, almost always figure out the problem and then they would ask "How did you know to do that?". I'd explain what happened best I could, but I'd be thinking to myself, "How did I know to do that? Well, I didn't until now."
Also, it was pretty cool at 11 years old to discover that I could make money just by working on my own to help other people folks fix problems and didn't necessarily need a "real" job.
Heh, I used to do that with all the binaries I could find in an attempt to learn their secrets (before I discovered I could do it with DEBUG.COM). I found that doing "copy command.com /b con" would show me more since it would stop on EOF characters.
The first computer I had was an 8088 XT clone with a turbo setting that went from 4.77 MHz to 8 MHz! It was blazing fast!
I remember the very first thing I did when we brought the computer home from the computer store was I went through the hard drive and saw this file that I couldn't possibly use, and deleted it. Why? Who knows, I was a dumb kid.
Yes, you guessed it. COMMAND.COM.
When I rebooted my computer, I got the "COULD NOT LOAD COMMAND.COM" error and I freaked out because I f'ed up my computer on the very first day I had it and my parents would kill me. I knew I could boot from my DOS 3.2.1 diskettes, but not from my hard drive, so after straining, I somehow managed to figure out how to copy the command.com from my diskette onto my hard drive and it worked.
And thus started my illustrious career in debugging computer problems and IT support, which continues to this day.