Our first PC came with Windows 3.1, if I remember correctly. When I entered DOS mode for the first time, I thought I had "deleted everything" :(

My father had to search that huge Windows tome that used to come with the OS, which had an aura like the Holy Bible, to figure out how to get back to Windows.

I think that the first thing which made me feel that DOS gaming had some merit was Ultima Underworld. In '86 I still was still able to sell people Commodore 64 or 128 machines and convince them that PC was crap for gaming, because it was. Even after VGA came around Amiga gaming was better. It was only 3D that made DOS become an attractive gaming environment, and even then DOS itself was crap.

Ultima Underworld and the wonderful world of EMS, Autoexec.bat and Config.sys introduced me to MS-DOS. But I already knew rudimentary Basic from the ZX Spectrum and rudimentary AmigaDOS, so it wasn't a great shock.

I think the first DOS game I played was Street Rod at a schoolmate`s place when I was about 8 and PCs were still a rare sight in households at that time in our country ( I am originally from Hungary) Another DOS game I played excessively was Jurassic Tycoon some years later.

I was pretty young and playing PC games on my mom's computer, so they were already set up. I remember fiddling with The 7th Guest though.

I'm using DOS since the Nineties on my first PC, and that's all.

When my parents bought a Packard Bell (remember them) computer in the mid 90s I wanted to start gaming. I discovered that the games didn't run in Windows, but in DOS instead.

I'm sometimes guilty of looking back on those times with rose-tinted glasses. Does anyone else remember having to create boot disks and editing auto exec files to get games to run properly?

Installing and running games for the first time always made me nervous because I was never sure how much time I would have to spend to get the game running properly.

But once it was running...AWESOME!!!!

My second cousin had a computer running DOS back in the late 80's. It was through this that I got introduced to the wonderful world of DOS gaming, and also these lovely games:
Alley Cat
Test Drive
Burgertime

With Alley Cat being the first computer game that I ever played.
Oh yes, I remember those times. And I'm very glad that PC-gaming is basically plug & play these days. Install the game and it will almost assuredly run. Back then, buying a game was a gamble, and I remember spending many sleepless nights trying to get Crusader: No Remorse to run properly.

DOS was 'it' back in the day! A bare metal OS, loved by programmers and hated by everyone else.

I had it installed on my 486 DX2 33mhz computer. The 'turbo' button on the front of the computer unleashed a whopping 66mhz of cpu horse power, thats right, 66mhz of pure single core processing power. When enabled I could only squeeze in a single cup of tea during the boot up sequence :)

- Kevin.

One of my most wanted on Gog.

As a kid I would whinge to my brother, "Please start Elite for me!". He always refused so I had to learn. DOS was the easy part. Elite was the hard part!

Right on, Commander!

Ah, the good old times, trying to get Quarantine and Realms of Arcania to run by tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys just to get enough ram available to run the games (always 1 or 2 kb missing).

Actually DOS commands are still being used. Especially if you need to do some low level scripting on Windows servers.