True Story...

In 1986, a curious young boy at the age of 8, when no one was home, sat in front of his family’s 8088 Tandy 1000sx at 4.77 mHz, with 640k base memory and a 20mb hard drive on an ISA card…ok, enough geek talk…

He mashed keys (not literally) but began to type behind what was known as a “prompt” that appeared as “c>” on the monitor. Most commonsense command he could think of was “help”. After typing in “help” and hitting the return key, the monitor displayed a list of more commands. So, he began typing various commands from the help menu, until this one in particular after entering it, displayed on the monitor, “Bad command or prompt” (try googling it, you’ll never find it) and he began sweating. Turned off the machine and turned it back on and began to sweat more as suddenly, it still displayed “Bad command or prompt”. Lesson learned after typing “format c:” even after it implies, “Are you sure (y/n)” and he thought to himself, “Sure, why not?”, types a “y” and hits return…OOPS!

The Tandy machine happened to have a little slot in the front that looked like it would accept a thin crust pizza slice. Wondering what that was, he looked around the hutch of the desk and saw a slim box that had the “pizza” in it. He looked through the slices and saw a pizza…no…seriously, a diskette titled “MS-DOS 3.2”, sweaty palms, inserted it, closed the latch and had no idea what to do. He turned it off and back on. Suddenly the pizza drive started making pizza and loud noises. He followed the onscreen prompts and installed DOS and saved the day without anyone in the family knowing.