Microsoft is going back to the basics for a joke at the expense of Windows Phone today. What do you do when your smartphone operating system has less than three percent market share worldwide? Reboot. While the software giant isn’t quite dramatically rebooting all over again, it has genuinely launched an MS-DOS mobile app for Windows Phone as part of an April Fools’ Day prank. It’s one of the more elaborate efforts we’ll likely witness on the most irritating and trivial day of the year.
Just like the real MS-DOS, you navigate around by typing in DIR to list available apps and using the CD command to enter into directories. I must admit, it’s rather fun and nostalgic. If you manage to navigate to the programs folder there’s a camera.exe app that will let you take an ASCII or CGA selfie. There’s even a Rock Paper Scissors game that reminds you of the good old days of Sound Blaster sound cards and CGA, EGA, and VGA display settings with the help of Cortana. It’s all incredibly nerdy, which is probably why I begrudgingly love it. Just type WIN at any point and sit back and marvel at Windows 3.1.
Fun commands:
- COLOR: alter the MS-DOS appearance with a variety of colors
- DATE: display the date in case you forgot it’s April Fools’ Day
- VER: shows the current MS-DOS version
- FORMAT: use format c: and Cortana will save the day
- WIN: launch Windows 3.1
- A: type A: to try and access a floppy disk
- HELP: discover all the commands
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