A GW-Basic Program and an Undeletable File (A Memory)

This is going to be another shorter one, but I think it’s funny and I’m glad to finally get it out of my head and onto “paper,” so to speak.

This happened sometime between September 1992 and June 1993 while I was in second grade. I think it was probably closer to the end of the school year, but I’m including the whole range since I can’t be sure.

At that point, I was still pretty new to BASIC programming and IBM PC compatibles in general. We had gotten our first compatible, a Tandy 1000 RLX, in the spring of 1992.

I can’t remember what the program I was writing actually did, but I do remember not knowing that DOS 5.0 had rules for filenames. Specifically, filenames followed the old 8.3 format: up to eight characters for the filename, followed by a three-character extension. Filenames also couldn’t contain spaces.

When I saved my program, I decided to name it after my second grade teacher. I’ll just call her “Mrs. B” for privacy, and because I honestly don’t remember how to spell her last name anymore.

So I typed:

SAVE "MRS BXXXXXXXX.BAS"

GW-BASIC accepted it without complaint. It automatically truncated the filename down to eight characters, but it also saved it with the space still in the filename.

I don’t think I ever did anything with the program, so eventually it came time to delete it. There was just one problem: DOS wouldn’t let me. Since spaces weren’t allowed in filenames, there was no way to type the filename correctly using the DEL command.

My next attempt was using DOS Shell. There, the file showed up without the space. Great! I selected it and tried to delete it…

File not found.

I don’t remember how long it took us to figure out how to delete that file, but eventually we did. Looking back, it’s just a funny memory. At the time, though, it seemed like a pretty serious problem. After all, I had managed to create a file that DOS itself apparently couldn’t delete.

– James