“No HISTORY. You can repeat the last command by pressing the right-arrow“

IIRC, there’s some limited command line editing support using the function keys. You can also get command line history using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOSKEY (if your DOS has it)

“So figuring out the available commands is using a lot of DIR .EXE's and DIR .COM's.”

Try

  C:\> DIR | MORE

(Alternatively, redirect the output to a file and use an editor. I think your DOS has edit.exe, but EDLIN is the true way)

You're doing right by your kid, mate.

In order to mitigate the toxic effects of "screen time", I've always felt that a young child's first computer should be an old-style one, like a Commodore 64 or even a DOS PC. Current-era machines designed in the same vein, like the Commander X16, would do just as well. Modern devices come with lots of mind-numbing distractions (YouTube videos, addictive pay-to-win "games") and no means to program them. Back in the day, a computer was for programming as a pencil is for writing with: it was the unique thing the machine was built for. The sooner a child comes to grips with programming and instructing a computer (beyond clicking things or selecting from menus), the more savvy they will be about its use; after all, pay-to-win "games" and YouTube and social media are all just programs also. The genie will do good or evil only according to whomever is rubbing the lamp, and understanding early that you can rub the lamp and command the genie, and the responsibility that entails is even more important now than it was back in the 80s.

I'd like to get a computer from my birth year, but I think UNIVAC-1's are pretty scarce.

Hmm, if I were to get a computer from my birth year, it looks like this would be the only option (or perhaps some big iron of slightly older vintage).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_9100A

Thankfully, three tiny vendors -- called Apple, Tandy, and Commodore -- all released machines in my birth year.

All I could find was the CDC 3600 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_3000_series#Upper_3000_s...

... haul out the Simh is my only option for now.

Ditto

COPY CON FILE.TXT is a "text editor" that got me by a number of times.

It takes text input from the terminal quite literally. No backspacing, no editing. You'll just get control characters in the resulting file.

Type it right the first time or start over. Brutal.

But it works from a disk that has only IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, and COMMAND.COM.

A few years ago this saved my bacon when we had a piece of lab equipment that booted DOS (5.0-ish, I think) from a CF card. There was some problem with it and I fixed it by remembering how to copy console input into a file. Input was terminated with ^Z, which I also managed to remember.

> The executables are located in C:\DOS (or c:\dos, because DOS don’t care about casing)

Somewhat true. IIRC, DOS changes all path input to uppercase and tries to find a file/directory which is labelled in uppercase. If some program manages to create a file which has a lowercase character in its name (for example FOo.TXT), you can't touch it with for example DEL, because DEL FOo.TXT would be converted to DEL FOO.TXT, and DOS would complain there is no FOO.TXT...

This was a problem with BASIC. It would uppercase file names before saving, but it accepted spaces in file names just fine, making them similarly difficult to deal with at the DOS command line. I re,ember some kid had left a file called "THE PROG.BAS" on one of the school's computers, and I couldn't do anything to it from DOS...

Probably should be glad that DOS doesn't support Unicode in filenames. Running toupper() on foreign words can lead to some unpredictable results.

IIRC, you could still get it with DEL FO*.TXT

There is a NuXT project if you want a modern 100% IBM XT clone: https://monotech.fwscart.com/NuXT_v20_MicroATX_Turbo_XT_10MH... Of course you can just use DOSBox, but there is something special of actually using real hardware :-).

No $PATH, but there is %PATH%.

Also, installing dos stuff in C:\DOS is what people generally did. I'm pretty sure it could be anywhere in the path.

I remember there being a PATH setting in either autoexec.bat or config.sys

Paths were set on Autoexec.bat, config.sys was for driver related configurations.

People not smart enough to edit Autoexec.bat apparently.

5160 == PC-XT. Had to look it up.

Probably should be running DOS 3.2 for the real vintage experience.

I seem to remember dir /p doing some pagination?

Jesus that last picture. I absolutely love and hate it! I have the luggable version of the XT, but sadly no disks for it. I do have a semi-cursed idea to bootstrap it using a modern PC, the serial port, and a machine code program poked in via the ROM BASIC, but its been backlogged for a while.

Something else neat, the manual for these have the BIOS source listed.

ADTPro[1] is a package for Apple II class machines that will bootstrap a diskless machine over cassette tape interface or serial port. If you have a disk but no usable media, it will let you image a boot disk.

[1] https://adtpro.com/