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Welcome, stranger: Inside Microsoft's command line shell

A walk through the back office, from MS-DOS to PowerShell

Command History? Luxury! When I were a lad...

Command history was another missing feature of the old MS-DOS days, implemented much later than the time it would have been most useful. Now, you can up arrow and cycle through previously entered commands. It was a simple and powerful ability that Unix users of the time would have laughed about.

It's easy to look back now and wonder how people put up with such a manual, non-user-friendly system, but personally I still look back on it fondly. Many hours were spent learning every command available, all the switches and what they do. This was pre-internet and bulletin-board systems being mainstream, so it was impossible to be distracted by cat videos or pictures.

There was Microsoft Windows, of course, which was launched in 1985: but up to Windows 3.x it wasn't actually an operating system, as it launched upon the MS-DOS platform.

This flipped around with the Windows 95 launch, where the GUI operating system was promoted to the main show and the command prompt was relegated to a troubleshooting start-up option, or became launchable as a program from inside Windows itself.

Although the GUI was the highlight, from Windows 95 to Windows ME was still MS-DOS integrated. You could still boot into a pure MS-DOS prompt by pressing the right start-up bypass keys.

Windows XP was the first PC operating system to drop the MS-DOS Prompt and change it to Command Prompt, due to a change to the NT kernel. The Windows NT family has used the newer Command Prompt since it started with Windows NT 3.1, so it was nothing new on that side of the fence.

Although home users had generally moved on, IT professionals still could leverage a lot of power and automation from the dated command line. It required little to no programming skills, but could still be manipulated to have a repeatable outcome.

Batch files were the most common way of achieving this; an executable file that had plain text commands. No compiling was required, and you could do some pretty tricky stuff.

Login scripts have been part of the IT professional's toolkit for quite some time. Microsoft’s Active Directory to this day gives a nod to the humble command line's power. Out of the box, user accounts have the option of a logon script to launch every time the user logs on.

Most commonly this would map network drives, but could do anything from change registry keys to start a particular service that the user would need running. Many companies out there will still be using a login script, because for the most part "it just works".

The command prompt's days must be numbered, though, with the entry of the heavyweight Windows PowerShell. Aptly named, PowerShell was released in 2006, but with little fanfare. This is probably due to people's love and knowledge of the command line – why change and have to learn something different, to perform functions they are already performing? PowerShell was also unofficially touted as "the Linux version of the command line", which gave an indication of its abilities. But for most, the new system was a monster under the bed; they were either unaware of its existence or too scared to have a look.

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