The year 1988 was quite a while back, over 20 years. Running a PC back then was different than it is today. Not only was DOS the king PC operating system, but there were a slew of utilities you routinely ran on your DOS computer, stuff that may seem trivial and stupid today.

I was reminded of the old, once-popular and very necessary utilities when I was using my laptop on a boat.

Yeah, I know: The trendy thing is to use a laptop on a jet plane at 38,000 feet. I see a lot of people checking those laptops at the airport security stations, but few of them get used in flight . And if I do see those laptops being used, people are often playing Spider Solitaire and not doing any actual work.

Using a laptop on a boat is probably popular where there are large bodies of water and commuting often involves using a boat. That was my situation on the east coast recently, riding a car ferry over a large and rather bumpy body of water. During the trip, my laptop’s Disk Drive Shock Detector program kept activating.

The Disk Drive Shock Detector program activates whenever the laptop gets jostled. It’s designed to protect the drive from something called a head crash. That’s a Bad Thing that can damage the drive.

Back in the 1980s, there was a utility for your hard drive-equipped PC called PARK. What PARK did was to position the read-write heads on the hard drive to a “safe” location on the disk. That was because if you stopped the computer, and therefore the hard drive, the heads may rest on the media surface, damaging the hard drive. So diligent users such as myself employed the PARK utility as part of a SHUTDOWN.BAT batch file.

Recalling the PARK utility made me think of other, once-popular but now dated utilities, which I ran every dang day as part of my PC life.

For example, the first two commands that generally appeared in the startup file AUTOEXEC.BAT were DATE and TIME. These commands were required because early PCs didn’t have internal clocks; you had to set the date and time manually each time the computer started. If you didn’t, then every PC believed it to be midnight on January 1, 1980.

There were lots of PCs that had files with date stamps of 01-01-80 back in those days.

If you were smart, then your PC featured a time card, or it had a time card as part of a universal expansion card. If so, then you had to run the utility that read the battery-backed up time on the card and set the date and time for the PC. On my PC, the program was called TIMER.

Another popular utility, actually a series of utilities, performed memory management on a PC. The tools let your DOS programs access any memory your computer had beyond 1MB.

Yes, that’s one megabyte of memory.

So if your PC had 4MB of RAM, which was very common, the memory utilities configured that extra 3MB for use by your programs, programs such as Windows.

Yes, Windows was a DOS program back in those days.

On my PC, after I ran the memory management tools, I partitioned a portion of extra memory as a RAM Drive. Essentially, it worked like a USB thumb drive or flash drive, but a portion of memory was used as a virtual disk drive. And it was fast, so I used the RAM drive to load otherwise clunky programs. It really sped things up.

All that startup nonsense isn’t required these days. But it gets me thinking: What utilities and programs do we use today that will look equally silly and useless 20 years from now?