THE MS-DOS

MS-DOS


MS-DOS (short for Microsoft Disk Operating System) is an operating system commercialized by Microsoft. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems and was the main operating system for computers during the 1980s. It was based on the Intel 8086 family of microprocessors, particularly the IBM PC and compatibles. It was gradually replaced on consumer desktop computers by operating systems offering a graphical user interface (GUI), in particular by various generations of the Microsoft Windows operating system. It was known before as QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and 86-DOS.



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. It was also the underlying basic operating system on which early versions of Windows ran as a GUI.
History



MS-DOS was a renamed form of 86-DOS by Seattle Computer Products. It began as an operating system for the then-new Intel 8086. Originally MS-DOS was designed to be an operating system that could run on any 8086-family computer. Each computer would have its own distinct hardware and its own version of MS-DOS. The greater speed attainable by direct control of hardware was of particular importance when running computer games. IBM-compatible architecture then became the goal. Soon all 8086-family computers closely emulated IBM's hardware, and a single version of MS-DOS was all that was needed for the market.

While MS-DOS appeared on PC clones, true IBM computers used PC-DOS, a rebranded form of MS-DOS.

Incidentally, the dependence on IBM-compatible hardware caused major problems for the computer industry when the original design had to be changed. For example, the original design could support no more than 640 kilobytes of memory. Manufacturers had to develop complicated schemes to access additional memory. This would not have been a limitation if the original idea of interfacing with hardware through MS-DOS had endured.





DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is a shorthand term for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions Windows 95, 98, and Me.

Related systems include MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS, PTS-DOS, ROM-DOS, JM-OS, and several others.

In spite of the common usage, none of these systems were named simply "DOS" (a name given only to an unrelated IBM mainframe operating system in the 1960s). A number of unrelated, non-x86 microcomputer disk operating systems had "DOS" in their name, and are often referred to simply as "DOS" when discussing machines that use them (e.g. AmigaDOS, AMSDOS, ANDOS, Apple DOS, Atari DOS, Commodore DOS, CSI-DOS, ProDOS, and TRS-DOS). These were incompatible with DOS executables and the MS-DOS API.
Design



All DOS-type operating systems run on machines with the Intel x86 or compatible CPUs, mainly the IBM PC and compatibles. Initially, DOS was not restricted to these, and machine-dependent versions of DOS and similar operating systems were produced for many non-IBM-compatible x86-based machines.

DOS is a single-user, single-task operating system with basic kernel functions that are non-reentrant- only one program at a time can be run. There is an exception with Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) programs, and some TSRs can allow multitasking. However, there is still a problem with the non-reentrant kernel: once a process calls a service inside of operating system kernel (system call), it must not be interrupted with another process calling system call, until the first call is finished.

The DOS kernel provides various functions for programs, like displaying characters on-screen, reading a character from the keyboard, accessing disk files and more.
Reserved device names

There are reserved device names in DOS that cannot be used as filenames regardless of extension; these are used to send application output to hardware peripherals. These restrictions also affect several Windows versions, in some cases causing crashes and security vulnerabilities.

A partial list of these reserved names is: NUL:, COM1: or AUX:, COM2:, COM3:, COM4:, CON:, LPT1: or PRN:, LPT2:, LPT3:, and CLOCK$.