MS-DOS part 1 - Navigation basics

We're at that point where the people who used to use MS-DOS a lot in the old days are going to start dying off and a lot of the information on how to use it won't be easily accessible since it's now quite archaic. It doesn't help that MS-DOS has always been complicated at best; as soon as Windows 95 hit, it dropped the skill floor on using a PC-compatible quite dramatically.

Unfortunately, due to the complexity I'll end up adding a lot of side notes as I go. MS-DOS is as wide as it is deep, and it gets worse once you get to machines from the early 90s and have to work with conventional memory, EMS, and XMS.

I'll start at the shallow end, then slowly add onto it as we go.

We'll skip most of the history of MS-DOS; Wikipedia or other sources have covered that in great detail.

My first brush with MS-DOS was in 1985, when my father got a Tandy 1000A. Yes, not the original 1000, but the silently revised model that Radio Shack put out not long after. The 1000 used BIOS revision 1.00.00, while the 1000A uses 1.01.00. The primary differences are bugfixes; the original BIOS had a data corruption issue with some hard drives. Otherwise, the hardware is identical between the 1000 and 1000A.

Something to note about these early IBM-compatibles (and the original IBM PC as well) is that they didn't come with a battery-backed clock. We'll be talking about that a little bit later when I get into the subject of two very important configuration files that will be used a lot up through the end of the Windows 9X era.

Making one of these early PCs boot is generally pretty simple, but there are a few things you absolutely should know about the boot process. You can boot from floppies that have the "system files" on them (e.g. the MS-DOS disk itself) or from a hard drive that has the system files installed. The caveat here is that the *location* of those system files matters.

First, the boot sector (at the very beginning of the disk layout) needs to have a proper boot sector. By default, a formatted floppy does not have this. You have to specify that you want those or add them immediately after formatting and before adding data. The reason why is that the next two files have a very important detail:

IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS (both of which are hidden files that don't normally appear on the files list) MUST be located at the very beginning of the disk. If anything else is using the space where those files should be located, then you can't make the disk bootable without clearing out the space where those two files need to be first. The third important file, COMMAND.COM, is the command interpreter and it doesn't have to be at the beginning of the disk. The reason the two .SYS files have to be at the beginning of the disk has to do with the bootstrap process. The boot sector of a disk, the first thing the computer reads, is a very tiny space. The code that gets loaded and run thus needs the next two files with the core of the operating system to be immediately accessible on the disk without looking around for it. At that point, the OS has enough code to be able to look around on your disk for where the next steps are located.

The next thing we're going to talk about is the command interpreter. This is where you type commands into MS-DOS, and it comes from COMMAND.COM on your disk.  Chances are on an old computer, the first thing the computer will do is to ask you for the current time and date. If you tap enter for each without entering anything, it'll default the PC's clock to midnight on January 1st, 1980.

On a very old version of MS-DOS, the command prompt will look something like...

A>

"Okay," you ask, "now what do I do?"

That's a fair question, and it's one every PC owner asked on their first boot. Let's talk about what this prompt actually is telling you, first, and this will also start to tie in some very important things about modern Microsoft Windows, too!

You're on the A drive, and it's waiting for a command. Not a lot of details there. You can, of course, change the prompt to give you more details, especially useful if you're using a hard disk. If you have a second floppy disk, you have access to a B drive. A hard disk will be your C drive (and possibly more if you have additional drives or partitions) and a CD-ROM drive will eventually show up with a drive letter later on as well.

This is why Windows starts with the C drive. A and B are reserved for floppies.

Let's try changing the prompt to something a little more useful, especially if you have a hard disk:

A>prompt $p$g

This command changes the prompt. The $p starts the prompt off with the full path to where you are. The $g adds the > after that. You could use $t and $d to show the time and date if you want, but $p$g is the prompt that you'll see most often on later MS-DOS versions and all the way up into the modern Windows era.

Now our prompt looks like:

A:\>

Not much of a change, right? It's a bigger one than it first appears to be. It's telling us that we're in the root directory of the disk on the A drive. Sometimes floppies (and pretty much all hard disks) will have what we call subdirectories. This term changed over time; in the modern era, they're called "Folders" and they're used to group files up together. For instance, if you have a bunch of documents saved together for a fall semester English class for the year 2025, you might have a subdirectory that looks like "FALL2025"

Ah, but shouldn't it have spaces? Sadly, the old MS-DOS was limited to 8.3 filenames. That means 8 characters (a character is a letter, number, or valid symbol) with an extension of 3 characters. The file COMMAND.COM we mentioned earlier is 8.3. Extensions are used to tell the user and programs what kind of file it is. A .TXT file is almost certainly going to be a plain text document with no special formatting, and it can be read by tools from the ancient past as well as modern versions of Notepad. An .EXE file is an executable file, meaning it's a program (or part of one; some programs have multiple .EXE files.)

Let's say we're inside that FALL2025 subdirectory I was mentioning earlier, and that it's on the hard disk that's the C drive. Our prompt looks like...

C:\FALL2025>

If we hadn't changed the prompt, it would have looked like...

C>

Sure is easier to know where you are when the prompt tells you, right? Okay, so how do you get in and out of these subdirectories? How do I change drives? Great question! Let's get into that now.

Let's switch over to the A drive for a moment. The command will be "A:" and pressing enter. It will look like this on screen:

C:\FALL2025>A:

A:\>

As you'd expect, then typing C: and pressing enter will take you back to the C drive and where you were already located on the C drive. That is to say, the FALL2025 subdirectory you created.

C:\FALL2025>A:

A:\>c:

C:\FALL2025>

You'll notice that the drive letters and directory names are case-insensitive. It doesn't matter whether you use uppercase, lowercase or even MiXeD case. Navigating doesn't seem too hard so far, right? Time to learn about two special terms the computer understands, "." and ".."

A single period by itself refers to the current subdirectory on the current drive, in other words where you are currently. This may seem useless at first, but it allows you do do things like...

C:\FALL2025>copy a:history.txt .

This tells our computer to copy the history.txt file that's on the A drive (in the current directory, which in this case is the root; we didn't specify a place, so it assumes we're where we want to be) over to the current directory we're in on the current drive. That, in this case, is the C drive in the FALL2025 directory.

You could also do something like this if you wanted to:

C:\FALL2025>copy a:history.txt b:

or..

C:\FALL2025>copy a:history.txt c:\finals\

or..

C:\FALL2025>copy a:history.txt c:\finals\history\

Okay, that first one seems pretty easy, right? Copy the file from the disk in drive A over to the one in drive B. That second one is a little more complicated. Despite the fact we're in the FALL2025 directory, we're telling the computer specifically to copy the history.txt file from the A drive over to the FINALS subdirectory off the root of the C drive.

The third example is only a little more complicated and builds off of that. Inside of that FINALS subdirectory off the C drive, we also have another nested subdirectory called HISTORY, and we're copying the history.txt file into that location.

We can extrapolate a few things based on what I've described so far. One is that if you don't specifically tell the computer where a file it, it will assume it's in the current location you're in. You can override that assumption by telling it a full path to a location or a relative path based on where you are on that drive.

We didn't cover ".." yet, but that's the final piece of the puzzle. Let's introduce the "CD" command. CD means Change Directory, and it does exactly what you would expect of it.

".." means the directory just above where we are currently. Since we're in FALL2025 on the C drive, .. will refer to C:\ which is the root of the C drive. So, with CD we can do..

C:\FALL2025>cd ..

C:\>

We're back on the root of the C drive. From there, we can go a lot of different places. For instance, we can CD into the finals directory by doing CD FINALS but there's an even better trick we can use here. Let's say we want to go into the history subdirectory of FINALS.\

C:\>cd finals\history

C:\FINALS\HISTORY>

Saves you a bit of time! You can also do..

C:\FINALS\HISTORY>cd ..\..

C:\>

We're now back at the root of that disk.

Now there are just two commands left to discuss for basic navigation: MD and RD.

MD is Make Directory. Remember that we're at the root of the C drive right now. If we do "md cheese" as a command, we're creating a new subdirectory off of the root of C called CHEESE. We could then go ahead and copy files into there if we want. In turn, RD means Remove Directory. It does exactly what you would expect, it removes an empty directory. You cannot use RD on a folder that has files in it, in older versions of MS-DOS. In later versions, there's a way to tell RD to remove a directory and everything that's inside of it (including any subfolders, and subfolders of subfolders, and so forth) but that's something we'll talk about only MUCH later for safety reasons.

We've talked about . and .., but there are two additional special characters that you will want to at least know about. The first is the question mark, which means "anything in this character slot". This probably doesn't mean much to you yet, so let's build an example situation and demonstrate how this gets used.

We have a disk in drive B. Let's start by going over to that disk and taking a look at it. We'll learn another very important command at this point.

C:\>B:

B:\>dir

DIR shows a directory of what files and subdirectories are in either the current location or a different location if you specify it. In our case, it prints out that we have nine files:

DUCK1.TXT

DUCK2.TXT

DUCK3.TXT

DUCK4.TXT

DUCK5.TXT

MALLARD.TXT

GOOSE.EXE

DUCKS.TXT 

DUCKS.EXE 

Okay. Let's try using the question mark with the dir command.

B:\>dir DUCK?.TXT

DUCK1.TXT

DUCK2.TXT

DUCK3.TXT

DUCK4.TXT

DUCK5.TXT

DUCKS.TXT

The question mark means "anything in that one character space", so the numbers 1-5 and the letter S apply and it shows us only what we asked for. The other files MALLARD.TXT, DUCKS.EXE, and GOOSE.EXE still exist, we just only wanted to see a subset of the files with that command.

You can use multiple question marks in a command. For instance..

B:\>dir duck?.???

DUCK1.TXT

DUCK2.TXT

DUCK3.TXT

DUCK4.TXT

DUCK5.TXT

DUCKS.TXT

DUCKS.EXE

As you can see, the ??? in the extension space covers literally any extension. We'll talk about an easier way to do that now. Time to introduce the very powerful * character. This is extremely powerful, but can be extremely dangerous when used with the delete command.

If we do...

B:\>dir duck?.*

DUCK1.TXT

DUCK2.TXT

DUCK3.TXT

DUCK4.TXT

DUCK5.TXT

DUCKS.TXT

DUCKS.EXE

Same results, right? We told it to match any single letter after the S (but not two or more characters after, so DUCKSAB.TXT wouldn't show up in the match if we had one on that disk) and the * matches literally anything in that space including multiple characters.

On the other hand, doing DIR DUCK*.TXT would show that hypothetical DUCKSAB.TXT I mentioned along with the other TXT files that start with DUCK, but would leave DUCKS.EXE out because that's not .TXT.

Let's use an example to show you how this can be dangerous. *.* means to match literally everything, so the command DEL *.* means you're telling the computer to delete literally every file in the current directory on the current drive. No second-guessing yourself, no confirmation, you're just wiping these files out.

A safer example would be COPY A:*.TXT B: which is telling the computer to copy all .TXT files from wherever you are on the A drive over to wherever you are on the B drive. The path (path means where in the subdirectory tree you are) is separate for each drive and so you have a current location for each one.

In short, you really need to be careful with wildcards (* is a wildcard for everything, ? is a wildcard for a single character) -- so, as you might imagine ????????.??? is the same as *.* on an old MS-DOS machine since your filenames are a maximum of 8.3 characters. On Windows, where filenames can be much larger, they won't be the same.

Let's review really quick for today's class:

We covered a little technical information about bootable disks (and we'll cover how to make such a disk later), we covered what subdirectories (also known as folders) are, how to navigate them using CD, pathing (using \ between directories to specify what's inside of one, multiple layers deep), COPYing files, DELeting files, MD to make directories, RD to remove them, the use of . and .. for navigation and specifying a precise location, and wildcards of both the ? and * variety.

On the next lesson, we'll talk about the PATH environment variable, which is a wonderful time saver, and then about the first of the two MS-DOS configuration files in the form of AUTOEXEC.BAT.

Desktop replacement? You'd be surprised.

I've found myself in a bit of a tough spot of late. With my computer having caught fire recently, I've been making do with a combination of an iPad, my phone, and my Steam Deck. Having used this arrangement for a few months, I have a few thoughts on how well things have gone and a few side notes along the way.

The first thing of note is obviously that SteamOS is not Windows. Many apps will run fine through Proton or Wine; in fact, I'd say most do at this point. That's still not 100% and you may want to use Linux-native apps where possible to avoid compatibility issues that can arise.

Of course, there's also the option of installing Windows onto the deck. There are a few notable things there too. One is that Valve still hasn't released an installer that officially allows for dual-booting off the internal SSD; this means that you only have two options for installing Windows on the device. Either you let it be a full-time Windows instance on the SSD, or you use an unsupported (Microsoft dropped official support for it and has added some barriers to make patching more painful) method called "Windows to Go" off of a SD card or USB drive.

I've tried the latter, with a USB 3 hard drive connected to the dock. Performance is shaky when I/O gets involved, especially when installing Windows updates. I really don't recommend it. One thing that I can say for sure is that even with relatively safe levels of debloating, Windows is nowhere near as lightweight as SteamOS. You absolutely can feel the difference in even just navigating the desktop environment.

Speaking of the desktop environment, I'm using the official Steam Deck dock and have it hooked up to my usual monitor, keyboard, mouse, gamepad, USB hub with microphone and other peripherals, and so forth. It all works very well. Some of that is luck on my part-- the official dock has had some compatibility problems in the past, particularly in the video area-- and the fact I have hardware that talks to it cleanly and reliably is purely luck. If you were going to try using a Deck as a mobile computer, I'd suggest looking into third party docks and checking reviews very carefully before making a purchase. The official dock has been a bit of a fiasco from day one.

While the machine itself only has 16GB of RAM, which I'd consider the absolute minimum you'd want on a Windows desktop at this point, performance is actually just fine. Multi-tab browsing isn't a problem; I've been able to play Final Fantasy XI (yes, the 20-year-old MMO) on the Deck with a browser window open with multiple tabs tracking in-game tasks without any problems. On Windows, I'd be pushing users to be using 32GB in general, since Windows is nowhere near as lean.

This brings up a thought I had maybe around 15-16 years ago. We've long passed the point where the average user needs a new computer to do average tasks in general. When Windows Vista came out, we had some issues with underspecced machines being incapable of keeping up with the demands of the OS, much less heavy applications on top of it, but by Windows 7 several things had happened to change the situation.

One is that Intel's onboard video stopped being completely useless. Having decent pixel shader support allowed the OS to offload UI rendering to hardware that's better suited to the task. While a lot of users berated the idea that you should need a GPU to handle desktop applications, calling it a waste of power and unnecessary, time has shown that it's definitely better to offload all you can to the GPU.

Another is that the CPU itself has passed the point where average casual PC use is problematic. It used to be that new versions of Microsoft Office would hit your CPU hard, that web browsing would show the limits of what your CPU could handle, and so forth. At this point, the only things that really push you to need a PC upgrade are the increasingly bloated OS releases from Microsoft and games that push your GPU, RAM, and to a lesser extent the CPU to their limits.

With that in mind, would I recommend a Deck as a casual carry-around computer for people? That really depends. A laptop is almost as portable, doesn't use an onscreen keyboard when you're not hooked up to a dock, and has a larger screen built-in. On the other hand, if you're using your device mostly to play games and then as a desktop PC when you're at home hooked up to a dock? Yes, the Deck absolutely can replace a desktop PC for a lot of the normal tasks you'd be doing with said computer.

Perhaps that's why they're pushing AI so hard. The average user can find that nearly any computer sold in the last 10 years to be suitable for most normal tasks, and the industry has survived purely on the idea that computing power would double every few years forcing people to buy upgraded hardware and software. We're in a matured market now, and perhaps the discounts we were getting to hardware due to competition and constant upgrades are coming to a permanent end. I don't think we've had any truly revolutionary upgrade in PC hardware in the last ~14 years since Sandy Bridge came out; Intel has been stuck with 10-15% upgrades at best for each generation.

I don't think AI is that killer app, despite half of the industry clutching at it in desperation, either. It increases power consumption greatly and the results are not great to put it mildly. The price for performance ratio is absolutely terrible, and it's actually getting worse with each new generation of LLM. I won't be surprised in the slightest if the collapse of the bubble causes the computer industry to nearly collapse outright and kills off a lot of well-established companies.

My last thoughts on this for right now:

If I had my full desktop machine up and running, would I be doing this still? Definitely not. This is workable, but having a high-spec desktop machine is going to be a superior experience for someone as steeped in tech as I have been my entire life. Do I miss having that desktop machine? Not nearly as much as you'd expect. This is quite usable and very comfortable. There are a few games I can't play this way, but a fairly large percentage of what I do works great without any tweaking or debugging. Programming is not one of those things; that's an area where having high CPU spec, a large amount of fast storage, and a ton of RAM is important. I could probably make it workable if I wanted to put in the effort, but medical reasons have increasingly pushed me away from that hobby. Thus, that's no longer a factor I should be concerned with.

Lastly, would I buy an upgrade for the Steam Deck should one appear? Absolutely. There are two things that make the Steam Deck a killer product. One is that Valve absolutely nailed the performance VS battery life and heat generation balance. If you look at all of the Windows handheld competitors, they have higher performance, but the battery life is significantly worse. The other major factor is that while SteamOS can't run everything, it runs a large percentage of what's out there very well and with lower overhead in the RAM/CPU due to the Valve-tweaked Linux install being more lightweight. They absolutely nailed that balance as well.

If I were going to upgrade, I'd want to find something with similar or better battery life on top of the increased performance. Preferably with similar or less heat generation than the existing Deck models, as well. I don't see Lenovo, Asus, etc. coming up with anything like that any time soon. Valve themselves have said that a successor to the Deck's APU will only happen when they can find something that is a true upgrade, and I suspect their criteria for what would be a true upgrade is the same as mine. As such, I'd be looking at Valve's work specifically when upgrade time comes.

Stories

I plan to do a lot more writing about things I've seen and experienced. With my memory deteriorating at a disturbing pace, I'd like to get my stories out and on paper (metaphorically) while I still can.

These probably won't be too useful to people in general, but consider them records of someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, who saw the computer revolution and the birth of the public internet firsthand.

Childhood risks

This particular stream of consciousness post is going to be me musing over a moderately risky thing I and two friends used to do. At the time, I was still in ATA Taekwondo; this was before the local dojo moved a few additional miles away.

There were four of us that were in Taekwondo. Myself, and all three of the next door neighbors just to the south of me. That would be their eldest daughter, Eileen, their middle son Sean, and the youngest son Chris. Eileen was several belts ahead, having been the first to join. I joined at nearly the same time as Sean and Chris, so the three of us were in the same class. That meant that the three of us would walk down to the dojo together.

The route wasn't too complicated. Head north on my street until it ended, head west less than half a block to the next major road, then take that north one block to the major intersection. The dojo would then be in the strip mall on the northwest corner. A bit of a walk; not a super long one, but it was less than optimal.

That's where the risk comes in. Sean had discovered a slight change to the route that would cut ten minutes out of the travel time. At the northern end of the street where you'd normally head to the west, there was an abandoned industrial warehouse. The locks on this old warehouse were long busted, and the chain-link fencing had deteriorated quite a bit as well. As you might imagine, it wasn't exactly hard to get inside the complex as you could just pull on the bottom of the fence and work your way right through. The land for the warehouse was a bit oddly-shaped as well, coming out to an L-shape with the other end coming out through a different section of damaged chain-link fence to the major road just south of the grocery store on the southeast corner of the major intersection I was mentioning earlier.

Just two problems-- one, investigating an abandoned warehouse is risky at best, and Sean was all about adventure. Two, the warehouse didn't use up all of the land; it was a fairly small warehouse and the rest of the route heading northwest across the property was overgrown brush and weeds.

I was never particularly thrilled about the idea of digging through the leftover materials and tools in that warehouse, but I wasn't great at explaining why. I don't think I could have ever explained it in a way Sean could agree with, honestly. The me of now, on the other hand, can easily put my concerns into words.

An abandoned warehouse full of tools is likely full of rusty metal. There's no guarantee catwalks are safe and won't collapse on you. There's no guarantee the ceiling or other structural aspects won't up and collapse if you touch something wrong. There's not a lot of risks, and the only real gain is satisfaction in finding out what's inside the place. It's not like you're going to find anything worth salvaging and taking home; whoever owned this property had long ago taken anything useful and left only what they didn't care about.

Well, we used this route a lot over the maybe three years before I moved to the other end of town. No major incidents happened; no injuries, no collapse, no death and destruction.

That old warehouse is long gone now. Sometime within five or six years of me moving away, they demolished it entirely. The property is still unused, though, and it now has a different kind of shortcut. Heading straight north from where the roadway ended will take you through a small dirt field and deposit you behind a Walmart that was only built there around 2000.

Nowhere near as dangerous as when I was a kid, to be sure, and no working your way through an old chain link fence.

Oh, and yes, I was kind of the voice of reason for my group of friends back in the day. That kept us out of serious trouble, but I can tell you trouble still found its way to me enough to be a headache and a half.

40th Anniversary of the NES

 Well, if there was ever a topic to inspire me to write, this would definitely be the one. 40 years ago today the NES officially hit store shelves across the USA. As the NES is one of my favorite pieces of hardware, I absolutely couldn't and shouldn't pass up the chance to be a little nostalgic.

My first encounter with the NES was actually with a NES in disguise, quite possibly almost a year before it came out. I grew up in the Phoenix metro area, and my family's local grocery store of choice (Safeway) had an interesting bottleneck and feature that they took advantage of for marketing. The feature was that the Phoenix metro had, in the 80s and 90s, a very diverse population that would make it great for test marketing new products. We would often see new products show up in stores well before the rest of the country, and in some cases the products we saw would never even make it to full production.

As for the bottleneck, there were two sets of front doors on the northeast and northwest corners of the Safeway. Both funneled to the north center before turning in. This allowed for a hallway where they could put crane machines, candy and other toy machines, soda vending machines, and arcade cabinets that you'd be forced to see on your way in or out of the store.

Well, one day-- probably very early 1985-- I ran into a PlayChoice-10 cabinet there. This machine was certainly impressive and new; it had ten different games to choose from, with two entire CRT displays in there. Game selection was done with dedicated buttons on the control panel, and you could actually see game instructions for each game on the upper monitor that was also used for game selection. Sheer luxury in an arcade cabinet form!

Of course the drawback was that for a single quarter you'd get five minutes of game time, with a permanent timer taking up the bottom right corner of that upper display. When your time was up, it'd pause the game and give you a chance to put in another credit to keep playing if you so chose. If not, it'd end the game and go back to cycling through the games' attract modes.

I had no idea at the time that this piece of hardware was the harbinger of what would eventually be my favorite console. In those early days, I played Super Mario Bros. the most. Months later, they'd replace one of the games with Gradius, which would then become one of my favorite series of all time.

Later, the local K-Mart would get a massive lit glass display case and would have the NES in there. Quite honestly, that display was pretty intimidating for a kid coming off the Atari 2600. Sure, I'd used computers before, but this upcoming NES was something entirely different. It had a robot, which you could see in the display case. It looked much more high-tech than any of the previous consoles released. No fake wood grain to be seen, it was all grey, black, and red.

Most intimidating of all, the gamepad: up until this point, the most common controller was a joystick you'd have to use with your right hand, with a single action button you'd use with your left thumb. No, here you'd have to get used to moving with your left thumb and take actions with your right thumb with the controller being a horizontally held rectangle. This was a major shift in how you interacted with the device.

I still hadn't realized yet that the PlayChoice-10 was the demonstration unit for the NES. Once the NES actually hit the store shelves, that's when everything clicked. The games on the PlayChoice-10 were many of the launch titles for the NES, and they played identically because they were functionally identical outside of color differences due to the different PPU chip used between the two.

I'd get my NES for Christmas 1987, about a year after they came out. My next door neighbor would also get one that same Christmas. While I got the Action Set with Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt, they'd get the Power Set with the added Power Pad and World Class Track Meet. I also received Spy Hunter and Iron Tank with mine. Spy Hunter had been an arcade favorite of mine for years at that point, and Iron Tank was the much-improved home version of SNK's arcade game TNK III which I'd also enjoyed quite a bit.

My neighbor's sons, who I hung around a lot as a kid, would borrow a number of games that I'd end up adding to my favorites list. Contra and Castlevania were both first played at my neighbor's home with their large color TV. The summer of 1987, they'd borrow a copy of Metroid, which would become another key game-- that story has a bit more going on, though.

Even before I got my NES, I was enthusiastic enough about it to ask my parents to buy the "Official Nintendo Player's Guide" book. This expensive $15 guidebook was a major help in the early days. It provided maps and tips for large parts of the early library, also also gave sneak peeks at upcoming releases. Several of the games in that sneak peek section would catch my eye, most notably one called "Mega Man". The premise was interesting enough that I'd later rent the game. Unfortunately, the first game is not nearly as well balanced as the later games; I wouldn't even come close to finishing the first game until after I'd played and beat its much better sequel. The skills I'd gained from completing Mega Man 2 would allow me to go back and defeat the original at last.

I've digressed a bit here, so let's go back to Metroid. The Player's Guide had a complete map to Metroid; my friends would ask me to use the guide to help them out while they were playing. You can't do several months of guide work like that without starting to memorize the layout. I'd work my ass off that summer to buy my own copy of Metroid, and would be the first in my neighborhood to beat the game.. literally the day I bought it. My mother was quite certain I'd stop playing the game at that point. On the contrary, I felt the need to get better at it, and I was already halfway or more to completely memorizing the map layout. Within a few months, I'd no longer need the map as I could walk someone through the game from memory alone; even blindfolded if desired. That came entirely from needing to be the map wrangler for my friends.

One more tiny digression: The NES was also where I learned how evil Nintendo could actually be. There were three different ways you could play Super Mario Bros. in the USA-- the version most people would know is the NES version. There was also the PlayChoice-10 version, which was identical. There was, however, also the "VS. System" version of the game. This version of the game had remixed many of the levels from the original NES game, but also contained some levels ported from the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 game (known as the Lost Levels when it later was released in the USA; the original game was considered way too difficult for the US market so we got an entirely different Super Mario Bros. 2 and would get Lost Levels in the early 90s on the SNES)-- in short, the difficulty is significantly higher in general!

I'd argue the NES was the most influential console to ever be released. The previous generation of hardware was mostly arcade ports or arcade-styled games, and the hardware was too limited to really get into deep game design. The NES/Famicom was where we were able to get games with significant complexity; Metroid, Super Mario Bros., Castlevania, The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest-- all of these games were made possible by the massive technology level leap between the previous generation and this new one. It may be a primitive machine by today's standards, but it was the first console to have real depth in its library.

While you can point to the Swordquest titles on the Atari 2600 as a predecessor to that kind of depth, the graphics capabilities left players wondering what they were actually doing. You couldn't really put dialogue in the game explaining how to play or what you were trying to do-- all of that had to be left to the manual (and heaven forbid you ever lose that manual!)

Sure, computers could do things in the same general vein; you already had Ultima on the C64/Apple/etc. The difference here is that this system didn't need a keyboard, didn't have floppy/cassette loading times, and the NES was easily accessible and cheap compared to a computer.

This was a massive change for the non-computer-literate masses; one thing I distinctly remember very well from my childhood is that even the girls in my classes growing up all played the NES as well. This was less the case in the next generation, but for that one generation literally everyone in my classes talked about and played NES games.

Forty years later, we're still playing those games. A tip of my hat to the designers of the hardware, the programmers, artists, and musicians behind those games, and most of all..

..to the friends and classmates all those years back who played alongside me and discussed these games in and out of classrooms.