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Story time: In 1994 my friends dad still had a PC running DOS/Windows 3.1
My friend and I had been downloading pron clips from a local BBS that were all in a *.dl file format.
My friend got anxious his father would find the porn and he would get in trouble, so in a command line for DOS, he typed:
C:\> del *.dlWhich the computer read as
del *.dl*which meant within seconds it was deleting every Dynamic Link Library on the PC, and in short order it crashed and then would not boot.So yes, especially in older Windows systems, you could delete all kinds of shit to bork it.
I just tried this in an MS-DOS + Windows 3.1 virtual machine that I have, and no, that doesn't happen.
del *.dldoes exactly what you'd expect.del *.dldoes not delete DLL files. Your friend probably accidentally pressed the L key twice.del *.dldoes not delete anything in any folder other than the current one. Your friend probably stored his porn in theC:\WINDOWS\SYSTEMfolder or something.- I don't think there even is a built-in way in MS-DOS to delete files matching a pattern across multiple folders. You can delete files in a single folder matching a pattern (
del), or you can delete a folder and all of its contents (deltree), but neither of those does what you're talking about. - Deleting DLLs stops Windows from starting, but doesn't stop MS-DOS from booting. MS-DOS doesn't have any DLLs to delete.
- MS-DOS isn't even capable of loading DLLs at all. If you were writing an MS-DOS program and you wanted to link code dynamically, you had to bring your own dynamic linker to do it with. Fun times.
You're right that it doesn't stop you from deleting system files, though, which is kind of odd as MS-DOS does have a mechanism for stopping you from doing that: the “system” attribute. This is used to protect the MS-DOS kernel files,
IO.SYSandMSDOS.SYS. For whatever reason, though, the Windows installer doesn't give the Windows system files this attribute, so you can still see them and delete them at will.Your friend probably accidentally pressed the L key twice
That's probably what he did and I don't know why he would store his porn in the system folder, but it did genuinely bork the computer and his dad was pretty pissed, because his dad was a banker and all his work was on it.
I never tested it myself partially because I didn't want to kill my system and well, my parents had a Mac.
Well, that's the nice thing about virtual machines! 😁 You can copy them and bork them freely.
In case you feel like experimenting, WinWorld has installation disk images for most of Apple's and Microsoft's vintage operating systems.
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