MS-DOS For All OS.
In July 1980, IBM gave Microsoft a contract for $ 186,000 to develop a 16-bit operating system for the personal computer. The firm of Gary Kildall, Digital Research had, although at this time CP/M-86 in the 16-bit version, but by circumstances no contract with IBM. Microsoft possessed at that time yet any operating system, Microsoft licensed CP / M from Digital Research in November 1977 for $ 50,000. Because Microsoft could not sublicense to others, an agreement with the company Seattle Computer Products was reached for QDOS. QDOS is a 16-bit CP / M clones and was April 1980 by Tim Paterson completed. First Microsoft licensed QDOS for $ 25,000. After a license agreement with IBM was made to Bill Gates bought QDOS in July 1981 for $ 50,000. It turned out that this was a very lucrative business. IBM delivered on all IBM computers as PC-DOS for the first time on the IBM 5150 PC, for all other OEM partners was the name MS-DOS. MS-DOS 1.0 consists of about 4,000 lines of assembly code.
In the file command.com The command interpreter is with the internal commands for MS-DOS. Along with the file io.sys routines for simple devices such as the access to the monitor, keyboard, hard drive and interfaces, and the boot code that form the base operating system. DOS hardware works very closely. MS-DOS in 1982 reached a high spread over 50 companies to license the operating system. Software and hardware manufacturers to build at this time on these binary standard. 1983, there were signs of significant success story of computers and there was the desire for a graphical user interface. Microsoft followed the trend and announced in 1983 on a graphical user interface called Windows. Many other systems lost in that time their market relevance. 1984, increasing the number of PC vendors, the MS-DOS licenses issue to over 200 In August, IBM brings to the AT out a computer that should expand in conjunction with MS-DOS 3.0/3.1 the personal computer market. 1985 MS-DOS is already distributed worldwide on Intel x86 computers. The reason is the easy extension of the computer by many third-party plug-in cards, relatively low cost, and a rapidly growing range of applications.
In 1988, MS-DOS and had become indispensable terms of market share a monopoly in DOS gained market. The number of MS-DOS installations worldwide grew to about 60 million, surpassing all other systems. Almost every software company offered appropriate standard applications such as word processing, spreadsheet or even special solutions such as data acquisition, CAD (Computer Aided Design) or image processing for MS-DOS to. The PC manufacturers designed their systems compatible with few exceptions MS-DOS. MS-DOS 5.0 the first time allowed the use of the High Memory and Upper Memory Area for the DOS itself, With the TSR programs and drivers. The most important new external commands in this release are Doskey DOSSHELL, EDIT, and EMM386 LOADHIGH. File Recovery recovers deleted files and restores UNFORMAT makes reformatting disks reversed. 2.88 MB floppy disks are now supported by IBM. The BASIC interpreter was detailed improvements.
Update:
With the release of Windows 95 to Windows ME MS-DOS has only a minor role. It is for compatibility with MS-DOS programs with Windows 95 installed and makes up only ME bootable. DOS programs are run directly in the DOS box or directly into MS-DOS before Windows starts. At best, boot disks or the like, it can still find application.
Small reference with the internal DOS commands
del erase, - Delete Files
rd rmdir - delete directory
you - View Table of Contents
cd, chdir - Change directory
cls - clears the screen
md, mkdir - Create a directory
copy - Copy one or more files
Ren, rename - rename files or directories
type - display text files
set - shows DOS environment variable or sets a new
ver - shows the DOS version number
vol - displays the volume label
Small reference with the external DOS commands
attrib - Displays attributes of files or sets
fdisk - partitioning the hard drive, create, modify or
move - move files
mem - Display the allocation of memory
tree - Displays the directory structure
format - Format a disk
Application
- Boot system for storage media
- File Management
- Only for single-user systems
- Network Client (SPX, TCP / IP / NetBEUI, IPX)
- Batch Processing
Structure Information
- 16-bit operating system (formerly known as 8-bit)
- Single Tasking
- Command interpreter for the internal and for external command views
- Integration of external drivers for peripheral devices possible
System environment
- Minimum: 512 KB RAM, 5 MB hard disk space (depending on version for full installation)
- FAT file system
- Available with any x86 compatible CPU
- Less RAM and hard disk space
