Education and research efforts let people learn about how a simple OS works.It was replaced by IBM's VSE (Virtual Storage Extended) OS.Īlthough most computer users prefer a modern OS with a graphical user interface ( GUI), there are still reasons to use MS-DOS. In the 1970s before the PC was invented, IBM had a different and unrelated DOS that ran on smaller business computers. Today, Windows operating systems emulate MS-DOS to continue to support DOS - or a DOS-like user interface - for special purposes. The first version of the Microsoft Windows OS was really an application that ran on top of MS-DOS. When booting MS-DOS from a floppy disk, the command prompt would be A:> where 'A:' represents the primary floppy disk drive. In this example, drive 'C:' represents the system's primary hard disk drive. This type of computer interface, where commands are input in response to a text prompt, is called a command-line interface ( CLI). The default command prompt shows the disk drive currently in use. Its prompt to enter an MS-DOS command looks like this: C:> It has a relatively simple but not overly friendly user interface. Like PC-DOS, MS-DOS was - and still is - a non-graphical, line-oriented, command-driven OS. Most users of either DOS system simply referred to it as Disk Operating System. MS-DOS was released for x86 computers, went through eight major versions and was ultimately retired from all active support in 2006. In 1981, IBM licensed and marketed its PC-DOS rebranding of MS-DOS to run on IBM PCs. It was essentially the same OS that Bill Gates's young company developed for IBM as Personal Computer - Disk Operating System (PC-DOS). MS-DOS was the Microsoft-marketed version of the first operating system ( OS) to be widely installed on personal computers (PCs). MS-DOS stands for Microsoft Disk Operating System and is also known as Microsoft DOS. What is MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System)?

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