"It's the DOS, stupid!" - frustrations when home-based microcomputers and peripherals do not work correctly - Workstyles - Column

Home Office Computing, Nov, 1993 by Nick Sullivan

In the checkout line at Office Max, the woman in front of me was acting selfconscious. When the clerk went to ring up her purchase, I understood why. She was buying a copy of DOS for Dummies. She had slipped it under a ream of paper, trying to hide it the way someone might try to hide Trojans amongst shaving cream and sundries at a pharmacy counter.

"I feel like such a moron," she said, half to me, half to the clerk, as we both fixated on the book.

"Oh, you're not stupid," I said to reasure her. "It's the computer that's stupid."

"It's kind of hard to tell, isn't it?" she said with a laugh.

It is kind of hard to tell. In the old days, if you had a problem with your computer, the hardware manufacturer would blame it one the software. The software publisher would blame it on faulty chips. Now, both hardware and software camps have found another out--it's you, the dummy! Blame the victim!

And there are some victims out there, real hit-and-run techno roadkills. Some friends bought a loaded 486 computer at a wholesale club--220MB hard drive, CD-ROM, fax/modem, and on a on--for about $1,500. No sooner was the thing plugged in than my phone started ringing off the hook. So I paid a house call and found that the thing didn't work. DOS, Windows, and other software were preloaded on the hard drive, but when I turned it on, instead of booting Windows from the C drive, the computer went to the A drive looking for instructions. I asked my friends for their DOS disk. "What's that?" They had never heard of one, let alone seen one. We searched the box high and low. No DOS. No way to control the $1,500 system.

I called customer support and explained the problem, focusing primarily on the lack of an operating system disk.

"Does it have a local bus?"

"How in tarnation to I know?"

"Read me the serial number."

This was getting humiliating. My friend and I wriggled under the desk, bushwhacked through all the wires, put on our reading glasses (computer repair is a sport for younger men), and started spouting numbers into the phone. None of them satisfied my man in customer service. Finally, my friend got up and looked at the box the computer came in. "Ah! It says local bus! It says local bus!"

"I'll send you the local bus DOS," intoned customer support.

When DOS came, we loaded four out of the six DOS 6 disks before we started getting damaged-file error messages. I finally give up and recommended that my friends try to get their money back and start over again.

So far, they've been paralyzed by their initial encounter with a computer. DOS for Dummies is Greek to them. They could care less about DOS or any of that other stuff. "What's CD-ROM mean?" they asked me. "What's a fax/modem?"

This is very disheartening, because they were so excited when they first bought the computer. Now, they feel like dummies, and their kids know they're dummies. I have a feeling that this scenario is played out over and over again across America, as families drugged by superstore stupor and rockbottom prices try to buy into the computer revolution they've heard about for 10 years.

"Technophobia is a sign of our times," says Dan Gookin, author of DOS for Dummies and PCs for Dummies, commenting on a survey by Dell Computer Corp. that reveals 55 percent of the American public suffers from technophobia. "Personal computers have been around for more than 20 years, yet Dell's research shows 25 percent of all adults still mourn the demise of the typewriter. Technology has simply passed many people by."

Has it? Maybe technology hasn't caught up to people yet. Who needs to humiliate themselves at the checkout counter buying DOS for Dummies? Maybe they're just waiting for something that works out of the box. Maybe us victims--can you believe they call us end users, not people?--should get together and write a book called Marketing for Dummies. Chapter One: The Customer Is King; Chapter 2: Enough Marketing, Give Use Innovation; Chapter 3: It's the DOS, Stupid! We'll keep it short and user friendly.