MS-DOS

Raised as a usability problem by 7 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2011–2025), in 7 threads.

People raised many different problems with MS-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 7 complaints

Needed arcane syntax and extended memory drivers to use RAM and change settings2025-02-15
Command history only recallable one character at a time via right arrow2024-06-26
File manager before Windows 95 was non-intuitive and hard to use2023-05-29
Each DOS app had its own separate keystroke interface, so support staff had to learn dozens2021-10-11
Getting games to run needed trial-and-error guided by obscure error messages2019-10-14
Backslash sits next to Return, so typing it by mistake can delete parent directories2012-03-19
Couldn't figure out how to fit drivers into conventional memory, so games lost sound2011-11-05