As the forerunner to the graphical user interfaces in Microsoft’s Windows platform, MS-DOS helped set the stage for the company’s dominance in the PC software market. When MS-DOS was released in 1981, ...

Earlier this month, I spent a day working in the throwback world of DOS. More specifically, it was FreeDOS version 1.1, the open source version of the long-defunct Microsoft MS-DOS operating system.

Linux is very good at running older software, but even the free and open-source operating system is stumped by the really ancient stuff developed for MS-DOS. Let’s go over how you can get ...

In the annals of PC history, IBM’s OS/2 represents a road not taken. Developed in the waning days of IBM’s partnership with Microsoft—the same partnership that had given us a decade or so of MS-DOS ...

Unlock the full InfoQ experience by logging in! Stay updated with your favorite authors and topics, engage with content, and download exclusive resources. Vivek Yadav, an engineering manager from ...

In context: Back in 1980, Tim Paterson was creating a new operating system he called QDOS or Quick and Dirty Operating System. The system was later renamed 86-DOS, as it was being designed to run on ...

A forensic computing researcher may have settled one of tech's longest standing controversies: whether the original version of Microsoft's seminal MS-DOS operating system contained code copied from an ...

Like the old-fangled BIOS (which is slowly being phased out with the help of EFI), the DOS operating system is a piece of computing history that refuses to be only history. While most folks will never ...

July 20, 1978: Apple DOS makes its debut on the Apple II, giving Apple its first official operating system. A command line interface with green text prompts on a black background, Apple DOS looks ...

A command-line interface is a terminal-style screen where you type commands at a prompt, one line at a time. You might associate it with the MS-DOS operating system that was widely used until the ...