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MS-DOS

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MS-DOS

An example of
MS-DOS's command-line interface, this one showing that the current
directory is the root of drive C.

Company/
developer:

Microsoft

OS family:

DOS

Source model:

Closed source

Latest stable release:

8.0 / September 14, 2000

Kernel
type:

Monolithic
kernel

Default user
interface:

DOS CLI

License:

Proprietary

Working state:

Discontinued

MS-DOS is an operating system
commercialized 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.

Contents

1 History

1.1 Development

2 Competition and
Development

3 End of MS-DOS

3.1 Legal issues

3.2 Multitasking

4 User interface

5 Windows NT

6 MS-DOS compatibility with
other Microsoft operating systems

7 Related systems

8 See also

9 External links

[edit]

History

MS-DOS was reverse-engineered
from the CP/M-86 operating system,
written by Digital Research.
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.

[edit]

Development

The original MS-DOS advertisement in 1981.

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.

The versions of MS-DOS and PC DOS and their releases are the following:

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 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 - 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)

The MS-DOS 6.22 boxart.

MS-DOS 6.0 - March 1993 - Added DoubleSpace disk
compression and other features

MS-DOS 6.2 - November 1993 - Bug fix release

MS-DOS 6.21 - February, 1994 - Following Stac Electronics
lawsuit, removed DoubleSpace disk compression

PC DOS 6.3 - April 1994

MS-DOS 6.22 - June 1994 - Last official stand-alone version.
DoubleSpace replaced with non-infringing but compatible DriveSpace tool

PC DOS 7.0 - April, 1995 - Bundles Stacker in place of DriveSpace

MS-DOS 7.0 - August 1995 - Shipped embedded in Windows 95. Included Logical block
addressing and Long File Name (LFN) support

MS-DOS 7.1 - August 1996 - Shipped embedded in Windows 95B (OSR2) (and Windows
98 in June 1998). Added support for FAT32 file
system

MS-DOS 8.0 - September 2000 - Shipped embedded in Windows
Me. Last version of MS-DOS. Removes SYS command, ability to boot to
command line and other features

PC DOS 2000 - Year 2000-compliant
version with minor additional features. Final member of the MS-DOS family

Source: PC Museum

[edit]

Competition and Development

On the IBM PC (and clones) platform, the initial competition to the
PC-DOS/MS-DOS line came from Digital Research, whose
CP/M-86
operating system had inspired MS-DOS. Digital Research continued to develop
CP/M-86 and offer it to computer manufacturers as an alternate to MS-DOS and
Microsoft's licensing requirements.

In the business world, the PC platform that MS-DOS was tied to faced
competition from the Unix operating system which ran on
many different hardware architectures. Microsoft even sold a version of Unix
called Xenix. The
Pick operating
system was another alternative OS for the PC.

In the emerging world of home users, a variety of other hardware platforms
were in serious competition with the IBM PC: the Apple II, early Apple Macintosh, the Commodore
64 and others. At first, the competition for these other platforms was with
IBM PC computers running MS-DOS. With the advent of IBM PC clones all running on
Intel processors,
the name IBM became less important to home users. What was important was keeping
up with Intel's steadily increasing clock speeds and the ability to run
MS-DOS.

Microsoft and IBM together began what was intended as the follow-on to DOS,
called OS/2. When
OS/2 was released in 1987, Microsoft began an ad campaign announcing that "DOS
is Dead", boldly proclaiming version 4 was the last full release.

MS-DOS had grown in spurts, with many significant features being taken (or
duplicated) from other products and operating systems, as well as
reverse-engineering tools and utilities including Norton Utilities, PC Tools (Microsoft
Anti-Virus), QEMM
expanded memory manager, Stacker disk compression, and so
on. The advent of OS/2, which offered a number of advanced features which had
been written together, was seen as the legitimate heir to the "kludgey" DOS
platform.

Digital Research, recognizing the need to continue the lower-level platform
represented by DOS, then developed DR DOS 5, which mirrored the OS/2 "platform
integration" model by adding features which were available only as third-party
add-ons for MS-DOS. Unwilling to lose any portion of the market, Microsoft
responded by announcing the "pending" release of MS-DOS 5.0 in May of 1990. This
effectively killed most DR DOS sales, until the actual release of MS-DOS 5.0 in
June 1991. Digital Research brought out DR DOS 6, which sold well until the
"pre-announcement" of MS-DOS 6.0 again stifled the sales of DR DOS [citation needed].

The pact between Microsoft and IBM to promote OS/2 began to fall apart in
1990 when Windows 3.0 became a
marketplace success. Much of Microsoft's further contributions to OS/2 also went
in to creating a third GUI replacement for DOS, Windows NT

IBM, which had already been developing the next version of OS/2, carried on
development of the platform without Microsoft and sold it as the alternative to
DOS and Windows.

[edit]

End of MS-DOS

MS-DOS has effectively ceased to exist as a product. It became the bootstrap
for Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me but was integrated as a full product,
thus ending the days of a stand-alone DOS. Today it is still used in various
embedded x86 systems due to its simplistic architecture, minimal memory
requirements, and minimal processor speed requirements.

[edit]

Legal issues

As a response to Digital Research's DR-DOS 6.0, which
bundled SuperStor
disk compression, Microsoft opened negotiations with Stac Electronics,
vendor of the most popular DOS disk compression tool, Stacker. Stac was
unwilling to meet Microsoft's terms for licensing Stacker and withdrew from the
negotiations. In the due diligence process,
Stac engineers had shown Microsoft some Stacker source code.

Soon, MS-DOS 6.0 was released, including the Microsoft DoubleSpace disk
compression utility program. Stac successfully sued Microsoft for patent infringement
regarding the compression algorithm used in DoubleSpace. This resulted in the
release of MS-DOS 6.21, which had disk-compression removed. Shortly afterwards
came version 6.22, with a new version of the disk compression system,
DriveSpace, rewritten to avoid the infringing code.

Prior to 1995, Microsoft licensed MS-DOS (and Windows) to computer
manufacturers under three types of agreement: per-processor (a fee for each
system the company sold), per-system (a fee for each system of a particular
model), or per-copy (a fee for each copy of MS-DOS installed). The largest
manufacturers used the per-processor arrangement, which had the lowest fee. This
arrangement made it expensive for the large manufacturers to migrate to any
other operating system, such as DR-DOS. In 1991 the US government Federal Trade
Commission began investigating Microsoft's licensing procedures resulting in
a 1994 settlement agreement limiting Microsoft to per-copy licensing. Digital
Research did not gain by this settlement, and years later its successor in
interest Caldera sued Microsoft for
damages. This lawsuit was settled with a monetary payment of 150 million
dollars.

[edit]

Multitasking

MS-DOS was not designed to be a multi-user or multitasking
operating system, but many attempts were made to add these capabilities. Terminate and
Stay Resident (TSR) system call were originally designed for device
drivers and extensible plugins that enhanced or added features. Companies
such as Borland began to tap into the TSR design with products like SideKick. Add-on
environments like TopView and especially DESQview
attempted to provide multitasking, and achieved some success when later combined
with the virtual 8086 mode and
virtual memory features
of the Intel 80386 and later
processors.

[edit]

User interface

MS-DOS employs a command line
interface and a batch scripting facility via
its command interpreter,
command.com. MS-DOS
was designed so users could easily substitute a different command line
interpreter, for example 4DOS.

Beginning with version 4.0, MS-DOS included a file manager program with a
quasi-graphical user interface (the DOS Shell) that featured
menus, split windows, and program shortcuts using character mode graphics.

[edit]

Windows NT

Windows NT, which is not based on DOS, provides a command line interface that
is in many respects similar to that of MS-DOS. This command line is provided by
a native executable, cmd.exe. Many command line applications (known as console
applications) for Windows are mistakenly referred to as DOS applications, while
in fact they are full Windows applications which use the console for their
output rather than a graphical interface, and cannot be run under any version of
MS-DOS.

Windows NT can run MS-DOS programs through the use of the NTVDM, and the 16-bit command.com
interpreter taken from MS-DOS 5.0 is still included to maintain application
compatibility with programs that still expect it. The command "ver" returns the
string "Microsoft(R) Windows DOS" when done from command.com, but "Microsoft
Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]" (or similar depending on the version of NT) when
run from CMD.

Recent versions of NT for x64 architectures, including Windows XP
Professional x64, Windows Server 2003 x64 and the upcoming Windows Vista x64, no
longer include the NTVDM and can therefore no longer run MS-DOS (or 16-bit
Windows) applications.

[edit]

MS-DOS compatibility with other Microsoft operating systems

From 1983 onwards various companies have worked on graphical user
interfaces capable of running on PC hardware. With DOS being the dominant
operating system several companies released alternate shells, e.g. Microsoft
Word for DOS, XTree, and the Norton Shell.
However, this required duplication of effort and did not provide much
consistency in interface design (even between products from the same
company).

Later, in 1985, Microsoft Windows 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 and its
clones. At first Windows met little success BUT this was also true for most
other companies efforts as well, for example GEM. After
version 3.0 Windows gained marked acceptance.

Later versions (Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me) used the DOS boot
process to launch itself into protected mode. Basic features related to the file
system, such as long file names, were only available to DOS when running as a
subsystem of Windows. Windows NT ran independently
of DOS but included a DOS subsystem so applications could run in a virtual machine under
the new OS. With the latest Windows releases even dual booting MS-DOS is
problematic as DOS can no longer read the basic file system.

[edit]

Related systems

Several similar products were produced by other companies. In the case of
PC-DOS and DR-DOS, it is common but
incorrect to call these "clones". Given that Microsoft manufactured PC-DOS for
IBM, PC-DOS and MS-DOS were (to continue the genetic analogy) "identical twins"
that diverged only in adulthood and eventually became quite different products;
DR-DOS was a clone of itself once removed.

PC-DOS

DR-DOS, Novell
DOS, and OpenDOS

FreeDOS,
FreeDOS
32, and GNU/DOS

PTS-DOS

These products are collectively referred to as DOS.

[edit]

See also

List of DOS
commands

Microsoft Windows

History of
Microsoft Windows

Bad command or
file name

Comparison of MS-DOS
and DOS-compatible operating systems

DOSBox, x86
emulator with DOS.

DOSKey,
MS-DOS utility

[edit]

External links

Tim Patterson on DOS
- Patterson wrote the QDOS OS

Richard Bonner's DOS
website

Batfiles - the DOS batch file
programming handbook and tutorial

MS-DOS Reference

A Brief
Timeline of DOS

Linux/dosemu

Ralf
Brown's Interrupt List

NTFS4DOS - NTFS compatible DOS

Old Os Information and downloads for MS-DOS
users

History of DOS

DOSbox, a multiplatform DOS
emulator

History of
Microsoft Windows

MS-DOS–based:

1.0 • 2.0 • 3.0 • 3.1x • 95 •
98 • Me

NT-based:

NT 3.1 • NT 3.5 • NT 3.51 • NT 4.0 • 2000 • XP •
Server
2003

CE-based:

CE 2.0 • CE 3.0 • CE
4.0 • CE 5.0 • Mobile

Forthcoming:

Vista • FLP
(thin-client) • CE 6.0 • Server
"Longhorn" • "Fiji" • "Vienna"

Other projects:

Neptune • Nashville • Cairo

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS"

Categories:
Articles
with unsourced statements | Discontinued
Microsoft software | DOS on
IBM PC compatibles | Operating
systems | Microsoft
operating systems

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This page was last modified 06:20, 22 May 2006.

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