1981 · Microsoft · Christian

MS-DOS

Microsoft operating system

Released: 12 August 1981
Platforms: Intel 8086 Windows
Genres: Christian
Developers: Microsoft
Publishers: —

About

MS-DOS ( em-ess-DOSS; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its alternate branding as IBM PC DOS, and a few operating systems attempting to be compatible with MS-DOS, are sometimes referred to as "DOS" (which is also the generic acronym for disk operating system). MS-DOS was the main operating system for IBM PC compatibles during the 1980s, from which point it was gradually superseded by operating systems offering a graphical user interface (GUI), in various generations of the graphical Microsoft Windows operating system.

IBM licensed and released it in 1981 as PC DOS 1.0 for use in its IBM Personal Computer. Although MS-DOS and PC DOS were initially developed in parallel by Microsoft and IBM, the two products diverged after twelve years, in 1993, with recognizable differences in compatibility, syntax and capabilities. Beginning in 1988 with DR-DOS, several competing products were released for the x86 platform.

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Development

MS-DOS began as a renamed version of 86-DOS, a disk operating system owned by Seattle Computer Products and written by Tim Paterson. Development of 86-DOS took only six weeks, as it was basically a clone of Digital Research's CP/M (for 8080/Z80 processors) ported to the Intel 8086. It had two notable differences from CP/M: an improved disk sector buffering logic and FAT12 instead of the CP/M filesystem. This first version was shipped in August 1980.

10 for US$25,000 that July. Microsoft kept the version number, but renamed it MS-DOS. 0 as one of three operating systems for the IBM 5150 or the IBM PC.

Legacy

From 1983 onwards, various companies worked on graphical user interfaces (GUIs) capable of running on PC hardware. However, this required duplicated effort and did not provide much consistency in interface design (even between products from the same company).

Later, in 1985, Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released as Microsoft's first attempt at providing a consistent user interface (for applications). The early versions of Windows ran on top of MS-DOS. At first Windows met with little success, but this was also true for most other companies' efforts as well, for example GEM. After version 3.0, Windows gained market acceptance.