Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Microsoft takes your smartphone back to 1981

If you are the average mobile user chances are you never experienced the early days of the PC when they ran MS-DOS. You missed out on those days of giant pixels, just one font that only came in white and print on either a black or green background. The days of no harddrive and a 5 ¼ inch floppy disk with 360 KB of storage. To access the programs (not apps) on our computers we would type a command at the screen prompt. Does that sound like something you would like to experience? If it does then Microsoft has an app for that.
Just in time for April Fool's Day the Kirkland-based giant is rolling out an app that will turn your Windows-based smartphone into a DOS-based smartphone. You will have the experience of using textline commands and seeing everything in black & white. The one part of the old DOS days it doesn't bring back is that old floppy disk for storage.
Before you rush out to download this app on your smartphone there are a few commands you should know. To navigate through the different directories you will need to use CD (change directory) followed by the directory name. To see what programs are in a directory you type DIR. If the program you want to access is list then you start it by typing the name of the program, such as, camera to start the camera.exe program.
The app does require that you have either Windows 8 or 8.1 and a minimum of 7MB of storage space on your smartphone. If your smartphone meets those requirements than you can download this free app and pretend you are back in the 1980's. Before you get the app you might like to watch this video. Your friends will probably scratch their heads when they see you typing and wonder why you are send text messages to yourself.
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