Same here. Tweaking FILES= and BUFFERS= etc. in CONFIG.SYS and discovering DEVICE=ANSI.SYS enabled me to create custom DOS prompts with positioning and colours was a game changer and really what started me on the road to programming decades ago!

I loved tweaking AUTOEXEC.BAT so much that I created a front end menu shell which could be end user customised that at one stage became the de-facto program launcher for an entire state government here in Australia for a couple of years in the '80s.

Once you started moving up the chain with Win3, etc, throw in config.ini and program.ini amongst others. So many painful memories or is that nostalgia.

I still remember copying win.ini (IIRC) to recover a friend's PC where it had somehow gone missing.

BTW I have never actually installed (and never seen installation discs of) Windows before Windows 95 - we just copied it between PCs.

> So many painful memories or is that nostalgia.

The Greek roots of “nostalgia” translate as “the pain of returning home,” so it’s a false dichotomy. :)

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nostalgia

Am I misremembering it as progman.ini or are those different files?

Eh? Ansible and other config tools are a modern iteration of the same. Devops is what you want.

And personally, I currently have a bad case of emacs configs.