Summer of '85: DOSBOS is rejected by ANALOG Computing

Although my first Atari computer was the Atari 400, we were able to upgrade it to an Atari 800XL by 1985. The 800XL was a tremendous improvement with its much improved keyboard and 64K of RAM. Eventually we also got a 1050 disk drive for it, which made programming much easier.Writing programs and saving them on cassette was an exercise in patience that I didn’t have as a young teenager.One of the first programs of a decent size that I actually completed was something I called DOSBOS. It was a “utility” that let you view disk contents (and a few other things) from BASIC. It was not very elegant as it was a BASIC program itself, but I worked on it for many weeks each day after school.Still, I remember that my Dad was very impressed with it and encouraged me to submit it to a magazine. Magazine submissions required an accompanying printout, but we didn’t yet have a printer. As I recall, he was able to print my docs and the program listing at his work (on green bar paper) so that I could submit it.My favorite Atari magazine back then was ANALOG, so that was the one I decided to submit it to. Alas, it was rejected, which shouldn’t have been too surprising. ANALOG published some high-quality programs and this first program of mine was just not good enough.I still have a rejection letter for it, though! I really like this rejection letter, because it is personal with hand-written comments:Looking at the dates on the printout and the letter, it took me about 2 months to hear back from ANALOG. I guess compared to that, waiting a couple days for something to get approved for the Apple App Store is nothing!The docs for DOSBOS spanned 6 pages and were longer than the program itself which was only 2 pages!Like I said, I’m not surprised DOSBOS was rejected. Being a BASIC program greatly limited its usefulness. To use it you had to LIST it to disk so it could be ENTERed. It used high line numbers so it would have less of a chance of overwriting a BASIC program you were working on, but if any lines were the same you could lose your code.With Atari BASIC you could SAVE or LIST programs to disk.

Saving was faster, but LOADing a SAVEd program erased what was in memory. LISTing was slower because it was writing the plain text to disk (instead of the tokenized version), which made the files bigger. But you could ENTER it which would act as if it were typed in and thus not erase what was in memory, unless the line numbers overlapped.This meant the process to use DOSBOS when working on a BASIC program was:This started running it and then you could use it how you wanted.Since you didn’t want it to stick around when saving your actual program, you would manually remove it by doing this:That command makes use of Atari BASIC’s ability to use variables at GOTO locations as I described in Programming the Atari with BASIC.Frankly, it was probably just easier to save your program and type DOS to get to the actual DOS menu. Nevertheless, it was fun to create and it always feels good to finish something. And I have to say, I still really like the name DOSBOS!Here is the original program listing, printed on that green bar paper that was so common at the time.I actually still have this on a 5.25” floppy disk:Here is the BASIC source code, although the inverse characters I used for text and comments do not display properly:If for some weird reason you really want to give DOSBOS a try, here is an ATR disk image you can download and boot from with your favorite hardware or emulator:DOSBOS ATRAt the BASIC prompt, you can load DOSBOS with this command:ShareWant to help support Goto 10? Check out the store, which has some merch you might like.Visit Goto 10 Store