DOS for Dummies by Dan Gookin

DOS for Dummies by Dan Gookin is, I'm almost certain, the very first "for Dummies" books and met a huge demand back when it first came out. It laid out the blueprint for all subsequent Dummies books, and unlike many of them, is genuinely funny. It laid out the blueprint because it had the spirit -- too many others simply follow the blueprint and it comes off as forced and stale. But the real test of DOS for Dummies by Dan Gookin is how well did it to for its buyers, and back in 1995 it was invaluable to helping me make DOS do something, as well as guide me in what disks to buy and introduced me to the various parts and functions of my new computer.

DOS for Dummies by Dan Gookin as a title offended me when I first saw it in the small mom and pop computer shop where I bought my first computer, since I was told it was the cheapest place to go. A copy was out on display and the bright yellow drew my eye and I considered buying it since after all I'd never owned a computer before and was not sure what I was getting into. However, as I said, the title offended me and so I passed it by that day.

So I bought my first computer and assembled the pieces fearfully, since I am not very mechanical and am never quite sure if I connect electronic parts correctly or not, and turned it on. Wonderful. What was that?

I spent three days staring at the DOS tree, wondering what to do next.

Some of you are laughing, many of you don't know what the DOS tree was. It was an innovation Microsoft added to DOS with the edition I bought then, DOS 5.0. It was basically what you know as a file tree diagram, such as Internet Explorer. If you're not familiar with that, you should look at it -- it lists every publicly available file on your system (some of them are kept secret and hidden by Windows to protect them from you meddling with them -- since they are very important, my advice is, leave them alone) in directory and folder and subfolder format.

So I stared at the DOS equivalent without the slightest understanding of what it was and what to do to make the blamed computer do something. I'm pretty sure that I was reading DOS 5.0 by Peter Norton in that time, but it wasn't helping me much. I was only a few pages into it and it was telling me how wonderful and powerful DOS 5.0 was, but not how to leave the DOS tree.

The amazing thing is that I didn't even know that what I was looking at was Microsoft's way of making DOS EASIER TO USE! The actual place to work in DOS was a small white letter in an otherwise totally black background -- the infamous DOS prompt:

C:\>

To make that do anything, you were not given even such a clue as the DOS tree. Of course, since my PC was equipped with Windows, all I had to do was type in the command WIN at the DOS prompt and then I would be taken to Windows 3.1 and life was a whole lot easier.

I don't know whether it was actually DOS FOR DUMMIES that taught that. Maybe I finally found the right section in Peter Norton's book. Still, I finally had to admit that when it came to personal computers I was still a dummy and that Norton's book was too techie for me -- the first in a long tradition of computer book that assumed you already know what you were doing.

So I swallowed my pride, drove to some computer store and bought DOS FOR DUMMIES by Dan Gookin and it was one of the most useful books I've ever read. It explained to me a whole host of things I needed to know about my computer and getting it work and keeping it working.

Even after I knew most of the information, I kept it ready to refer to when I wanted to buy diskettes, so I'd be sure to buy the right kind -- there used to be a lot more choices then than now, including the now obsolete 5 1/2 inch floppies that were really floppy.

• Hardware
• Software
• Files
• File management
• DOS error messages
• DOS commands you needed to know
• Common errors
• CONFIG.SYS
• AUTOEXEC.BAT
• Basic computer information everybody now already knows but which I didn't back in 1995

In DOS FOR DUMMIES by Dan Gookin, when you were told to call up a geek and offer him Cheetos to come over to your house to fix your computer, he somehow made that really funny. When countless for Dummies authors since then have written it, they're copying him.

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