Games - MS-DOS

	Games - MS-DOS

MS-DOS is an operating system made by Microsoft. It was the most widely used member of the DOS family of operating systems. It was the dominant operating system for the PC compatible platform during the 1980s. It has gradually been replaced on consumer desktop computers with various generations of the Windows operating system.

MS-DOS was originally released in 1981 and had eight major versions released before Microsoft stopped development in 2000. It was the key product in Microsoft's growth from a programming languages company to a diverse software development firm, providing the company with essential revenue and marketing resources.

History

MS-DOS was created by computer manufacturer Seattle Computer Products (SCP) in 1980 as QDOS (for Quick and Dirty Operating System), but was renamed 86-DOS because it was designed to run on the Intel 8086 processor. In a sequence of events that would later inspire much folklore, Microsoft licensed QDOS to IBM on behalf of SCP. Microsoft acquired the system for only $50,000 from SCP shortly before the PC's release.

Development

IBM and Microsoft both released versions of DOS; the IBM version was supplied with the IBM PC and known as PC-DOS. Originally, IBM only validated and packaged Microsoft developments, and thus IBM's versions tended to be released shortly after Microsoft's. However, MS-DOS 4.0 was actually based on IBM PC-DOS 4.0, as Microsoft was by then concentrating on OS/2 development. Microsoft released its versions under the name "MS-DOS", while IBM released its versions under the name "PC-DOS". Initially, when Microsoft would license their OEM version of MS-DOS, the computer manufacturer would customize its name (i.e. TandyDOS, Compaq DOS, etc). Most of these versions were identical to the official MS-DOS; however, Microsoft began to insist that OEMs start calling the product MS-DOS. Eventually, only IBM resisted this move.

Computer advertisements of this period often claimed that computers were "IBM-Compatible" or very rarely "MS-DOS compatible". The two terms were not synonyms. There were computers which used MS-DOS which could not run all the software that an IBM-Compatible machine could. An example is the Pivot, which used MS-DOS but was not IBM-Compatible.

Programs written specifically for IBM compatibles could run faster by bypassing slow MS-DOS functions, e.g. by writing video information directly to the area of memory assigned to it.

PC DOS 1.0 - August 1981 - Initial release with the first IBM-PC
PC DOS 1.1 - May 1982
MS-DOS 1.25 - May 1982 - First release for non-IBM hardware
MS-DOS 2.0 - March 1983 - Introduced features from Unix such as subdirectories, handle-based file operations, command input/output redirection, and pipes. Microsoft decided to use backslashes as pathname separators rather than slashes as on Unix apparently due to the latter character being used as the switch character in most DOS and CP/M programs. Adds support for hard drives and 360KB floppy disks
PC DOS 2.1 - October 1983
MS-DOS 2.11 - March 1984
MS-DOS 3.0 - August 1984 - Adds support for 1.2MB floppy disks and larger hard disks
MS-DOS 3.1 - November 1984
MS-DOS 3.2 - January 1986 - Supported 2 hard disk partitions of up to 32MB, one primary and one "logical drive" in an "extended partition"
PC DOS 3.3 - April 1987
MS-DOS 3.3 - August 1987 - Supported multiple logical drives
MS-DOS 4.0 - June 1988 - actually derived from IBM's codebase rather than the reverse
PC DOS 4.0 - July 1988 - added DOS Shell
& support for hard disks of >32MB using the format from Compaq DOS 3.31. Also added many bugs and offered less free conventional memory than before. Generally regarded as an unsuccessful release and to be avoided
MS-DOS 4.01 - November 1988 - bug-fix release
MS-DOS 5.0 - June 1991 - In response to DR-DOS
5.0, adds comparable features to that product: memory management, full-screen editor, QBasic programming language, online help, and DOS Shell gains task switcher. Also add file transfer facillity licenced from Rupp Technology (FastLynx) See DR-DOS
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