DOS

Raised as a usability problem by 11 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2013–2026), in 11 threads.

People raised many different problems with DOS, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 8 complaints

Described as bizarrely user hostile, buggy, messy and unreliable for people using it2026-07-24
Had to search online for correct settings to get a game running2024-06-20
Rename treats wildcards differently from other commands, which is strange and counterintuitive2021-12-10
Constant struggle keeping drivers and TSR programs working within low memory limits2021-09-13
Every word processor had different keystrokes and menus, so users had to relearn each one2021-02-22
Menu couldn't launch programs from another drive, forcing users to drop to command prompt2020-01-05
No feedback while searching over the network, user can't do anything and waits blindly2019-12-19
Memory model concept was incredibly confusing to understand, even for experienced programmers2013-08-07