Microsoft, which needed an operating system for the IBM Personal Computer, hired Tim Paterson in May 1981 and bought 86-DOS 1.10 for US$75,000 in July of the same year. This first version was shipped in August 1980. Development of 86-DOS took only six weeks, as it was basically a clone of Digital Research's CP/M (for 8080/Z80 processors), ported to run on 8086 processors and with two notable differences compared to CP/M: an improved disk sector buffering logic, and the introduction of FAT12 instead of the CP/M filesystem. MS-DOS was a renamed form of 86-DOS – owned by Seattle Computer Products, written by Tim Paterson. It was also the underlying basic operating system on which early versions of Windows ran as a GUI.įurther information: DOS and Timeline of DOS operating systems MS-DOS command prompt Ultimately, it was the key product in Microsoft's development from a programming language company to a diverse software development firm, providing the company with essential revenue and marketing resources. Progressive version releases delivered support for other mass storage media in ever greater sizes and formats, along with added feature support for newer processors and rapidly evolving computer architectures. Initially, MS-DOS was targeted at Intel 8086 processors running on computer hardware using floppy disks to store and access not only the operating system, but application software and user data as well.

Although MS-DOS and PC DOS were initially developed in parallel by Microsoft and IBM, the two products diverged after twelve years, in 1993, with recognizable differences in compatibility, syntax, and capabilities.īeginning in 1988 with DR-DOS, several competing products were released for the x86 platform, and MS-DOS went through eight versions, until development ceased in 2000. IBM licensed and re-released it in 1981 as PC DOS 1.0 for use in its PCs. MS-DOS was the main operating system for IBM PC compatibles during the 1980s, from which point it was gradually superseded by operating systems offering a graphical user interface (GUI), in various generations of the graphical Microsoft Windows operating system.

Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few operating systems attempting to be compatible with MS-DOS, are sometimes referred to as 'DOS' (which is also the generic acronym for disk operating system). MS-DOS ( / ˌ ɛ m ˌ ɛ s ˈ d ɒ s/ em-es- DOSS acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. MS-DOS versions 1x-7.0 unsupported as of Decem MS-DOS versions 7.10 and 8.0 unsupported as of July 11, 2006.

Windows 7 loader 2.2 2 32 bits