Miles Sound System (MSS), formerly known as Audio Interface Library (AIL), is a sound software system primarily for video games and used mostly as an alternative for low-end audio chipsets. It uses little CPU time while providing adequate audio output. It was originally a middleware driver library for soundcards to use in DOS applications when no viable alternative was available. Epic Games Tools (formerly RAD Game Tools) acquired the technology from Miles Design in 1995.
84-421: The 1992 AIL version 2 for DOS has been released by John Miles as open-source ( public domain without restrictions) in 2000. The package can be found on his personal site ( KE5FX.com ) and contains source code for both real-mode and protected-mode programs. The Miles Sound System was used in its history by over 7,000 video games across 18 platforms. Computer Gaming World stated in 1994 that "Many of
168-483: A 64 KiB page frame in the reserved upper memory area. 80386 and later systems could use a virtual 8086 mode (V86) mode memory manager like EMM386 to create expanded memory from extended memory without the need of an add-on card. The second specification was the Extended Memory Specification (XMS) for 80286 and later systems. This provided a way to copy data to and from extended memory, access to
252-559: A Y2K compliant DOS. As it reports itself as "IBM PC-DOS 7 Revision 1", it is often refereed to as "IBM PC-DOS7R1" or just "PC-DOS7R1". Hitachi used PC DOS 2000 in their legacy Drive Fitness Test (4.15) and Hitachi Feature Tool (2.15) until 2009. ThinkPad products had a copy of the latest version of PC DOS in their Rescue and Recovery partition. PC DOS 7.1 added support for Logical Block Addressing (LBA) and FAT32 partitions. Various builds from 1999 up to 2003 were not released in retail, but used in products such as
336-401: A batch file is interpreted as a program to run. Batch files can also make use of internal commands, such as GOTO and conditional statements . The operating system offers an application programming interface that allows development of character-based applications, but not for accessing most of the hardware , such as graphics cards , printers , or mice . This required programmers to access
420-417: A choice of PC DOS or CP/M-86 , Kildall's 8086 version. Side-by-side, CP/M cost US$ 200 more than PC DOS, and sales were low. CP/M faded, with MS-DOS and PC DOS becoming the marketed operating system for PCs and PC compatibles. Microsoft originally sold MS-DOS only to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). One major reason for this was that not all early PCs were 100% IBM PC compatible . DOS
504-494: A configuration file similar to CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. If the MSDOS.SYS BootGUI directive is set to 0 , the boot process will stop with the command processor (typically COMMAND.COM) loaded, instead of executing WIN.COM automatically. DOS uses a filesystem which supports 8.3 filenames : 8 characters for the filename and 3 characters for the extension. Starting with DOS 2 hierarchical directories are supported. Each directory name
588-515: A few developers and computer engineers still use it because it is close to the hardware. DOS's structure of accessing hardware directly allows it to be used in embedded devices . The final versions of DR-DOS are still aimed at this market. ROM-DOS is used as operating system for the Canon PowerShot Pro 70. On Linux , it is possible to run DOSEMU , a Linux-native virtual machine for running DOS programs at near native speed. There are
672-505: A few glitches. Newly added EMS drivers were only compatible with IBM's EMS boards and not the more common Intel and AST ones. DOS 4.0 is also notable for including the first version of the DOS Shell , a full-screen utility designed to make the command-line OS more user-friendly. Microsoft took back control of development and released a bug-fixed DOS 4.01. DOS 5 debuted in June 1991. DOS 5 supported
756-479: A file name with a space, has sometimes been used by viruses or hacking programs to obscure files from users who do not know how to access these locations. DOS was designed for the Intel 8088 processor, which can only directly access a maximum of 1 MiB of RAM. Both IBM and Microsoft chose 640 kibibytes (KiB) as the maximum amount of memory available to programs and reserved the remaining 384 KiB for video memory,
840-619: A group of Microsoft programmers (primarily Paul Allen , Mark Zbikowski and Aaron Reynolds ) began work on PC DOS 2.0. Completely rewritten, DOS 2.0 added subdirectories and hard disk support for the new IBM XT , which debuted in March 1983. A new 9-sector format bumped the capacity of floppy disks to 360 KB. The Unix -inspired kernel featured file handles in place of the CP/M-derivative file control blocks and loadable device drivers could now be used for adding hardware beyond that which
924-511: A manifesto proposing the development of an open-source replacement. Within a few weeks, other programmers including Pat Villani and Tim Norman joined the project. A kernel, the COMMAND.COM command line interpreter (shell), and core utilities were created by pooling code they had written or found available. There were several official pre-release distributions of FreeDOS before the FreeDOS 1.0 distribution
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#17328798939991008-658: A more user-friendly environment, numerous software manufacturers wrote file management programs that provided users with WIMP interfaces. Microsoft Windows is a notable example, eventually resulting in Microsoft Windows 9x becoming a self-contained program loader, and replacing DOS as the most-used PC-compatible program loader. Text user interface programs included Norton Commander , DOS Navigator , Volkov Commander , Quarterdesk DESQview , and Sidekick . Graphical user interface programs included Digital Research's GEM (originally written for CP/M) and GEOS . Eventually,
1092-513: A number of other emulators for running DOS on various versions of Unix and Microsoft Windows such as DOSBox . DOSBox is designed for legacy gaming (e.g. King's Quest , Doom ) on modern operating systems. DOSBox includes its own implementation of DOS which is strongly tied to the emulator and cannot run on real hardware, but can also boot MS-DOS, FreeDOS, or other DOS operating systems if needed. MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS related operating systems are commonly associated with machines using
1176-413: A program run from one floppy while accessing its data on another. Hard drives were originally assigned the letters "C" and "D". DOS could only support one active partition per drive. As support for more hard drives became available, this developed into first assigning a drive letter to each drive's active primary partition , then making a second pass over the drives to allocate letters to logical drives in
1260-448: A rebranded version, Microsoft 's MS-DOS , both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible systems from other manufacturers include DR-DOS (1988), ROM-DOS (1989), PTS-DOS (1993), and FreeDOS (1998). MS-DOS dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995. Although the name has come to be identified specifically with this particular family of operating systems, DOS
1344-566: A series of disagreements over two successor operating systems to DOS, OS/2 and Windows. They split development of their DOS systems as a result. The last retail version of MS-DOS was MS-DOS 6.22; after this, MS-DOS became part of Windows 95, 98 and Me. The last retail version of PC DOS was PC DOS 2000 (also called PC DOS 7 revision 1), though IBM did later develop PC DOS 7.10 for OEMs and internal use. The FreeDOS project began on 26 June 1994, when Microsoft announced it would no longer sell or support MS-DOS. Jim Hall then posted
1428-476: A standard 1.44 MB floppy disk to 1.86 MB. SuperStor disk compression technology was replaced with Stac Electronics ' STACKER . An algebraic command line calculator and a utility program to load device drivers from the command line were added. PC DOS 7 also included many optimizations to increase performance and reduce memory usage. The most recent retail release was PC DOS 2000 – released from Austin in 1998 – which found its niche in
1512-428: A terrible problem being sued by people claiming we had stolen their stuff. It could be horribly expensive for us to have our programmers look at code that belonged to someone else because they would then come back and say we stole it and made all this money. We had lost a series of suits on this, and so we didn't want to have a product which was clearly someone else's product worked on by IBM people. We went to Microsoft on
1596-415: A time can use them, and DOS itself has no functionality to allow more than one program to execute at a time. The DOS kernel provides various functions for programs (an application program interface ), like character I/O, file management, memory management, program loading and termination. DOS provides the ability for shell scripting via batch files (with the filename extension .BAT ). Each line of
1680-512: A variant of CP/M-80 , intended as an internal product for testing SCP's new 16-bit Intel 8086 CPU card for the S-100 bus . The system was initially named QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), before being made commercially available as 86-DOS . Microsoft purchased 86-DOS, allegedly for US$ 50,000. This became Microsoft Disk Operating System, MS-DOS, introduced in 1981. Within a year Microsoft licensed MS-DOS to over 70 other companies, which supplied
1764-433: Is a platform-independent acronym for disk operating system , whose use predates the IBM PC. Dozens of other operating systems also use the acronym, beginning with the mainframe DOS/360 from 1966. Others include Apple DOS , Apple ProDOS , Atari DOS , Commodore DOS , TRSDOS , and AmigaDOS . IBM PC DOS (and the separately sold MS-DOS ) and its predecessor, 86-DOS , ran on Intel 8086 16-bit processors. It
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#17328798939991848-530: Is a real DOS, like MS-DOS 6.22 or PC DOS 5.00. One makes a bootable floppy disk of the DOS, adds a number of drivers from OS/2, and then creates a special image. The DOS booted this way has full access to the system, but provides its own drivers for hardware. One can use such a disk to access cdrom drives for which there is no OS/2 driver. In all 32-bit (IA-32) editions of the Windows NT family since 1993, DOS emulation
1932-705: Is also 8.3 format but the maximum directory path length is 64 characters due to the internal current directory structure (CDS) tables that DOS maintains. Including the drive name, the maximum length of a fully qualified filename that DOS supports is 80 characters using the format drive:\path\filename.ext followed by a null byte. DOS uses the File Allocation Table (FAT) filesystem. This was originally FAT12 which supported up to 4078 clusters per drive. DOS 3.0 added support for FAT16 which used 16-bit allocation entries and supported up to 65518 clusters per drive. Compaq MS-DOS 3.31 added support for FAT16B which removed
2016-480: Is an optional built-in driver for a fourth line printer supported in some versions of DR-DOS since 7.02. CONFIG$ constitutes the real mode PnP manager in MS-DOS 7.0–8.0. AUX typically defaults to COM1 , and PRN to LPT1 ( LST ), but these defaults can be changed in some versions of DOS to point to other serial or parallel devices. The PLT device (present only in some HP OEM versions of MS-DOS)
2100-520: Is available in COMMAND.COM. Programs like the Microsoft CD-ROM Extensions (MSCDEX) provide access to files on CD-ROM disks. Some TSRs can even perform a rudimentary form of task switching. For example, the shareware program Back and Forth (1990) has a hotkey to save the state of the currently-running program to disk, load another program, and switch to it, making it possible to switch "back and forth" between programs (albeit slowly, due to
2184-408: Is based upon DOS 5. Although there is a default configuration (config.sys and autoexec.bat), one can use alternate files on a session-by-session basis. It is possible to load drivers in these files to access the host system, although these are typically third-party. Under OS/2 2.x and later, the DOS emulation is provided by DOSKRNL. This is a file that represents the combined IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM,
2268-502: Is invalid." These names (except for NUL) have continued to be supported in all versions of MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS ever since. LST was also available in some OEM versions of MS-DOS 1.25, whereas other OEM versions of MS-DOS 1.25 already used LPT1 (first line printer ) and COM1 (first serial communication device ) instead, as introduced with PC DOS. In addition to LPT1 and LPT2 as well as COM1 to COM3 , Hewlett-Packard's OEM version of MS-DOS 2.11 for
2352-413: Is likely to render the media unbootable. It is, however, possible to replace the shell at will, a method that can be used to start the execution of dedicated applications faster. This limitation does not apply to any version of DR DOS, where the system files can be located anywhere in the root directory and do not need to be contiguous. Therefore, system files can be simply copied to a disk provided that
2436-504: Is provided by way of a virtual DOS machine (NTVDM). 64-bit (IA-64 and x86-64) versions of Windows do not support NTVDM and cannot run 16-bit DOS applications directly; third-party emulators such as DOSbox can be used to run DOS programs on those machines. DOS systems use a command-line interface . A program is started by entering its filename at the command prompt. DOS systems include utility programs and provide internal commands that do not correspond to programs. In an attempt to provide
2520-686: The HP Portable Plus also supported LST as alias for LPT2 and 82164A as alias for COM2 ; it also supported PLT for plotters . Otherwise, COM2 , LPT2 , LPT3 and the CLOCK$ (still named CLOCK in some issues of MS-DOS 2.11 ) clock device were introduced with DOS 2.0, and COM3 and COM4 were added with DOS 3.3. Only the multitasking MS-DOS 4 supported KEYBD$ and SCREEN$ . DR DOS 5.0 and higher and Multiuser DOS support an $ IDLE$ device for dynamic idle detection to saving power and improve multitasking. LPT4
2604-550: The IBM PC Convertible , IBM's first computer to use 3 + 1 ⁄ 2 -inch floppy disks, released April 1986, and later the IBM Personal System/2 in 1987. In June 1985, IBM and Microsoft signed a long-term Joint Development Agreement to share specified DOS code and create a new operating system from scratch, known at the time as Advanced DOS. On 2 April 1987 OS/2 was announced as the first product produced under
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2688-631: The Intel x86 or compatible CPUs , mainly IBM PC compatibles . Machine-dependent versions of MS-DOS were produced for many non-IBM-compatible x86 -based machines, with variations from relabelling of the Microsoft distribution under the manufacturer's name, to versions specifically designed to work with non-IBM-PC-compatible hardware. As long as application programs used DOS APIs instead of direct hardware access, they could run on both IBM-PC-compatible and incompatible machines. The original FreeDOS kernel, DOS-C ,
2772-451: The Intel 80286 -derived IBM PC/AT , its next-generation machine. Along with this was DOS 3.00. Despite jumping a whole version number, it again proved little more than an incremental upgrade, adding nothing more substantial than support for the AT's new 1.2 megabyte (MB) floppy disks. Planned networking capabilities in DOS 3.00 were judged too buggy to be usable and Microsoft disabled them prior to
2856-411: The embedded software market and elsewhere. PC DOS 2000 is a slipstream of 7.0 with Y2K and other fixes applied. To applications, PC DOS 2000 reports itself as "IBM PC DOS 7.00, revision 1", in contrast to the original PC DOS 7, which reported itself as "IBM PC DOS 7.00, revision 0". PC-DOS 2000 was the last version of IBM PC-DOS that was sold at retail. IBM advertised it as
2940-490: The extended partition , then a third pass to give any other non-active primary partitions their names (where such additional partitions existed and contained a DOS-supported file system). Lastly, DOS allocates letters for optical disc drives , RAM disks , and other hardware. Letter assignments usually occur in the order the drivers are loaded, but the drivers can instruct DOS to assign a different letter; drivers for network drives, for example, typically assign letters nearer to
3024-509: The read-only memory of adapters on some video and network peripherals, and the system's BIOS. By 1985, some DOS applications were already hitting the memory limit, while much of reserved was unused, depending on the machine's specifications. Specifications were developed to allow access to additional memory. The first was the Expanded Memory Specification (EMS) was designed to allow memory on an add-on card to be accessed via
3108-435: The $ 40 PC DOS compared to 3.4% with the $ 240 CP/M-86. Over the history of IBM PC DOS, various versions were developed by IBM and Microsoft. By the time PC DOS 3.0 was completed, IBM had a team of developers covering the full OS. At that point in time, either IBM or Microsoft completely developed versions of IBM PC DOS going forward. By 1985, the joint development agreement (JDA) between IBM and Microsoft for
3192-494: The 32‑ MiB drive limit and could support up to 512 MiB. Finally MS-DOS 7.1 (the DOS component of Windows 9x) added support for FAT32 which used 32-bit allocation entries and could support hard drives up to 137 GiB and beyond. Starting with DOS 3.1, file redirector support was added to DOS. This was initially used to support networking but was later used to support CD-ROM drives with MSCDEX . IBM PC DOS 4.0 also had preliminary installable file system (IFS) support but this
3276-572: The 65,520-byte high memory area directly above the first megabyte of memory and the upper memory block area. Generally XMS support was provided by HIMEM.SYS or a V86 mode memory manager like QEMM or 386MAX which also supported EMS. Starting with DOS 5, DOS could directly take advantage of the HMA by loading its kernel code and disk buffers there via the DOS=HIGH statement in CONFIG.SYS. DOS 5+ also allowed
3360-591: The DOS virtual machine is provided by WINOLDAP. WinOldAp creates a virtual machine based on the program's PIF file, and the system state when Windows was loaded. The DOS graphics mode, both character and graphic, can be captured and run in the window. DOS applications can use the Windows clipboard by accessing extra published calls in WinOldAp, and one can paste text through the WinOldAp graphics. The emulated DOS in OS/2 and Windows NT
3444-471: The IBM PC BIOS supported. BASIC and most of the utilities provided with DOS were substantially upgraded as well. A major undertaking that took almost 10 months of work, DOS 2.0 was more than twice as big as DOS 1.x, occupying around 28 KB of RAM compared to the 12 KB of its predecessor. It would form the basis for all Microsoft consumer-oriented OSes until 2001, when Windows XP (based on Windows NT )
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3528-618: The IBM PC decided that critical components of the machine, including the operating system, would come from outside vendors. This radical break from company tradition of in-house development was one of the key decisions that made the IBM PC an industry standard. Microsoft , founded five years earlier by Bill Gates , was eventually selected for the operating system. IBM wanted Microsoft to retain ownership of whatever software it developed, and wanted nothing to do with helping Microsoft, other than making suggestions from afar. According to task force member Jack Sams : The reasons were internal. We had
3612-519: The IBM PC. The initial version of DOS was largely based on CP/M-80 1.x and most of its architecture, function calls and file-naming conventions were copied directly from the older OS. The most significant difference was the fact that it introduced a different file system, FAT12 . Unlike all later DOS versions, the DATE and TIME commands were separate executables rather than part of COMMAND.COM . Single-sided 160 kilobyte (KB) 5.25-inch floppies were
3696-698: The IBM ServerGuide Scripting Toolkit. A build of this version of DOS appeared in Norton Ghost from Symantec . Version 7.1 indicates support for FAT32 also in MS-DOS . Most builds of this version of DOS are limited to the kernel files IBMBIO.COM , IBMDOS.COM , and COMMAND.COM . The updated programs FDISK32 and FORMAT32 allow one to prepare FAT32 disks. Additional utilities are taken from PC DOS 2000, where needed. In 1986, IBM announced PC DOS support for client access to
3780-534: The OS's release. In any case, IBM's original plans for the AT had been to equip it with a proper next-generation OS that would use its extended features, but this never materialized. PC DOS 3.1 (released March 1985) fixed the bugs in DOS 3.00 and supported IBM's Network Adapter card on the IBM PC Network . PC DOS 3.2 added support for 3 + 1 ⁄ 2 -inch double-density 720 KB floppy disk drives, supporting
3864-467: The agreement. At the same time, IBM released its next generation of personal computers, the IBM Personal System/2 (PS/2). PC DOS 3.3, released with the PS/2 line, added support for high density 3 + 1 ⁄ 2 -inch 1.44 MB floppy disk drives, which IBM introduced in its 80286-based and higher PS/2 models. The upgrade from DOS 3.2 to 3.3 was completely written by IBM, with no development effort on
3948-536: The basis of the OS/2 1.0 kernel. This version of DOS is distinct from the widely released PC DOS 4.0 which was developed by IBM and based upon DOS 3.3. Digital Research attempted to regain the market lost from CP/M-86, initially with Concurrent DOS , FlexOS and DOS Plus (both compatible with both MS-DOS and CP/M-86 software), later with Multiuser DOS (compatible with both MS-DOS and CP/M-86 software) and DR DOS (compatible with MS-DOS software). Digital Research
4032-411: The boot sector is DR DOS compatible already. In PC DOS and DR DOS 5.0 and above, the DOS system files are named IBMBIO.COM instead of IO.SYS and IBMDOS.COM instead of MSDOS.SYS . Older versions of DR DOS used DRBIOS.SYS and DRBDOS.SYS instead. Starting with MS-DOS 7.0 the binary system files IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS were combined into a single file IO.SYS whilst MSDOS.SYS became
4116-404: The corresponding load drive whenever an application starts. There are reserved device names in DOS that cannot be used as filenames regardless of extension as they are occupied by built-in character devices. These restrictions also affect several Windows versions, in some cases causing crashes and security vulnerabilities. The reserved names are: In Windows 95 and Windows 98 , typing in
4200-499: The default OS kernel , though the MS-DOS component remained for compatibility. With Windows 95 and 98, but not ME, the MS-DOS component could be run without starting Windows. With DOS no longer required to use Windows, the majority of users stopped using it directly. As of 2024 , available compatible systems are FreeDOS , ROM-DOS , PTS-DOS , RxDOS and REAL/32 . Some computer manufacturers, including Dell and HP , sell computers with FreeDOS as an OEM operating system. And
4284-678: The development of PC DOS had each company giving the other company a completely developed version. Most of the time branded versions were identical, but there were some cases in which each of the companies made minor modifications to their version of DOS. In the fall of 1984, IBM gave all the source code and documentation of the internally developed IBM TopView for DOS to Microsoft so that Microsoft could more fully understand how to develop an object-oriented operating environment , overlapping windows (for its development of Windows 2.0 ) and multitasking . Microsoft first licensed, then purchased 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products (SCP), which
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#17328798939994368-498: The disk access required). Back and Forth could not enable background processing however; that needed DESQview (on at least a 386 ). PC DOS IBM PC DOS (an acronym for IBM Personal Computer Disk Operating System ), also known as PC DOS or IBM DOS , is a discontinued disk operating system for the IBM Personal Computer , its successors, and IBM PC compatibles . It was manufactured and sold by IBM from
4452-450: The early 1980s into the 2000s. Developed by Microsoft , it was also sold by that company as MS-DOS . Both operating systems were identical or almost identical until 1993, when IBM began selling PC DOS 6.1 with new features. The collective shorthand for PC DOS and MS-DOS was DOS , which is also the generic term for disk operating system, and is shared with dozens of disk operating systems called DOS . The IBM task force assembled to develop
4536-459: The end of the alphabet. Because DOS applications use these drive letters directly (unlike the /dev directory in Unix-like systems), they can be disrupted by adding new hardware that needs a drive letter. An example is the addition of a new hard drive having a primary partition where a pre-existing hard drive contains logical drives in extended partitions; the new drive will be assigned a letter that
4620-553: The game publishers have decided to support only those sound cards which are supported by the Miles drivers", especially the Sound Blaster . This multimedia software -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . DOS DOS ( / d ɒ s / , / d ɔː s / ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and
4704-400: The hardware directly, usually resulting in each application having its own set of device drivers for each hardware peripheral. Hardware manufacturers would release specifications to ensure device drivers for popular applications were available. The DOS system files loaded by the boot sector must be contiguous and be the first two directory entries . As such, removing and adding this file
4788-575: The introduction of Xenix . The company planned to improve MS-DOS over time, so it would be almost indistinguishable from single-user Xenix, or XEDOS , which would also run on the Motorola 68000 , Zilog Z-8000 , and LSI-11 ; they would be upwardly compatible with Xenix, which BYTE in 1983 described as "the multi-user MS-DOS of the future". IBM, however, did not want to replace DOS. After AT&T began selling Unix, Microsoft and IBM began developing OS/2 as an alternative. The two companies later had
4872-458: The location of the reserved name (such as CON/CON, AUX/AUX, or PRN/PRN) crashes the operating system, of which Microsoft has provided a security fix for the issue. In Windows XP , the name of the file or folder using a reserved name silently reverts to its previous name, with no notification or error message. In Windows Vista and later, attempting to use a reserved name for a file or folder brings up an error message saying "The specified device name
4956-399: The manufacturers of major DOS systems began to include their own environment managers. MS-DOS/IBM DOS 4 included DOS Shell ; DR DOS 5.0, released the following year, included ViewMAX , based upon GEM. Although DOS is not a multitasking operating system, it does provide a terminate-and-stay-resident (TSR) function which allows programs to remain resident in memory. These programs can hook
5040-442: The mid-1980s, Microsoft developed a multitasking version of DOS . This version of DOS is generally referred to as "European MS-DOS 4" because it was developed for ICL and licensed to several European companies. This version of DOS supports preemptive multitasking, shared memory, device helper services and New Executable ("NE") format executables. None of these features were used in later versions of DOS, but they were used to form
5124-659: The new features from MS-DOS 6.0 appeared in PC ;DOS 6.1 including the new boot menu support and the new commands CHOICE , DELTREE , and MOVE . QBasic was dropped and the MS-DOS Editor was replaced with the IBM E Editor . It also licensed components of Central Point's PC Tools , such as Central Point Backup Utility (CPBACKUP). PC DOS 6.1 reports itself as DOS 6.00. PC DOS 6.3 followed in December. PC DOS 6.3
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#17328798939995208-556: The number of people he had to deal with at the ESD (Entry Systems Division) facility in Boca Raton, Florida . Perhaps the first public mention of the operating system was in July 1981, when Byte discussed rumors of a forthcoming personal computer with "a CP/M-like DOS ... to be called, simply, 'IBM Personal Computer DOS ' ". 86-DOS was rebranded IBM PC DOS 1.0 for its August 1981 release with
5292-526: The only disk format supported. In late 1981, Paterson, now at Microsoft, began writing PC DOS 1.10. It debuted in May 1982 along with the Revision ;B IBM PC. Support for the new double-sided drives was added, allowing 320 KB per disk. A number of bugs were fixed, and error messages and prompts were made less cryptic. The DEBUG.EXE was now able to load files greater than 64 KB in size. Later,
5376-486: The operating system for their own hardware, sometimes under their own names. Microsoft later required the use of the MS-DOS name, with the exception of the IBM variant. IBM continued to develop their version, PC DOS , for the IBM PC. Digital Research became aware that an operating system similar to CP/M was being sold by IBM (under the same name that IBM insisted upon for CP/M), and threatened legal action. IBM responded by offering an agreement: they would give PC consumers
5460-540: The part of Microsoft, who were working on "Advanced DOS 1.0". DOS 3.30 was the last version designed with the IBM XT and floppy-only systems in mind; it became one of the most popular versions and many users preferred it to its buggy successor. PC DOS 4.0 (internally known as DOS 3.4 originally) shipped July 1988. DOS 4.0 had some compatibility issues with low-level disk utilities due to some internal data structure changes. DOS 4.0 used more memory than DOS 3.30 and it also had
5544-528: The proposition that we wanted this to be their product. IBM first contacted Microsoft to look the company over in July 1980. Negotiations continued over the months that followed, and the paperwork was officially signed in early November. Although IBM expected that most customers would use PC DOS, the IBM PC also supported CP/M-86 , which became available six months after PC DOS, and UCSD p-System operating systems. IBM's expectation proved correct: one survey found that 96.3% of PCs were ordered with
5628-506: The system calls are passed through to the OS/2 windowing services. DOS programs run in their own environment, the bulk of the DOS utilities are provided by bound DOS / OS2 applications in the \OS2 directory. OS/2 can run Windows 3.1 applications by using a modified copy of Windows (Win-OS/2). The modifications allow Windows 3.1 programs to run seamlessly on the OS/2 desktop, or one can start a WinOS/2 desktop, similar to starting Windows from DOS. OS/2 allows for 'DOS from Drive A:', (VMDISK). This
5712-606: The system timer or keyboard interrupts to allow themselves to run tasks in the background or to be invoked at any time, preempting the current running program and effectively implementing a simple form of multitasking on a program-specific basis. The DOS PRINT command does this to implement background print spooling. Borland Sidekick , a popup personal information manager (PIM), also uses this technique. Terminate-and-stay-resident programs are also used to provide additional features not available by default. Programs like CED and DOSKEY provide command-line editing facilities beyond what
5796-685: The use of available upper memory blocks via the DOS=UMB statement in CONFIG.SYS. The DOS emulation in OS/2 and Windows runs in much the same way as native applications do. They can access all of the drives and services, and can even use the host's clipboard services. Because the drivers for file systems and such forth reside in the host system, the DOS emulation needs only provide a DOS API translation layer which converts DOS calls to OS/2 or Windows system calls. The translation layer generally also converts BIOS calls and virtualizes common I/O port accesses which many DOS programs commonly use. In Windows 3.1 and 9x,
5880-509: The use of the High Memory Area (HMA) and Upper Memory Blocks (UMBs) on 80286 and later systems to reduce its conventional memory usage. Also all DOS commands now supported the /? option to display command syntax. Aside from IBM's PC DOS, MS-DOS was the only other version available as OEM editions vanished since by this time PCs were 100% compatible so customizations for hardware differences were no longer necessary. The POWER.EXE
5964-417: The user changes them. Under DOS, this problem can be worked around by defining a SUBST drive and installing the DOS program into this logical drive. The assignment of this drive would then be changed in a batch job whenever the application starts. Under some versions of Concurrent DOS , as well as under Multiuser DOS , System Manager and REAL/32 , the reserved drive letter L: will automatically be assigned to
6048-505: Was also used in OS/2 for the PowerPC . PC DOS 6.3 also featured SuperStor disk compression technology from Addstor . PC DOS 7 was released in April 1995 and was the last release of DOS before IBM software development (other than the development IBM ViaVoice ) moved to Austin. The REXX programming language was added, as well as support for a new floppy disk format, XDF , which extended
6132-416: Was bought by Novell , and DR DOS became PalmDOS and Novell DOS ; later, it was part of Caldera (under the names OpenDOS and DR-DOS 7.02 / 7.03 ), Lineo , and DeviceLogics . Gordon Letwin wrote in 1995 that "DOS was, when we first wrote it, a one-time throw-away product intended to keep IBM happy so that they'd buy our languages." Microsoft expected that it would be an interim solution before
6216-508: Was derived from DOS/NT for the Motorola 68000 series of CPUs in the early 1990s. While these systems loosely resembled the DOS architecture, applications were not binary compatible due to the incompatible instruction sets of these non-x86-CPUs. However, applications written in high-level languages could be ported easily. DOS is a single-user, single-tasking operating system with basic kernel functions that are non-reentrant : only one program at
6300-592: Was developed to be similar to Digital Research 's CP/M —the dominant disk operating system for 8-bit Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 microcomputers—in order to simplify porting CP/M applications to MS-DOS. When IBM introduced the IBM PC , built with the Intel 8088 microprocessor, they needed an operating system. Chairman John Opel had a conversation with fellow United Way National Board Executive Committee member Mary Maxwell Gates , who referred Opel to her son Bill Gates for help with an 8088-compatible build of CP/M. IBM
6384-488: Was introduced that has the APM standard in version 5.02. This was the last version of DOS that IBM and Microsoft shared the full code for, and the DOS that was integrated into OS/2 2.0's, and later Windows NT's, virtual DOS machine . PC DOS remained a rebranded version of MS-DOS until 1993. IBM and Microsoft parted ways—MS-DOS 6 was released in March, and PC DOS 6.1 (separately developed) followed in June. Most of
6468-558: Was modified for the IBM PC by Microsoft employee Bob O'Rear with assistance from SCP (later Microsoft) employee Tim Paterson . O'Rear got 86-DOS to run on the prototype PC in February 1981. 86-DOS had to be converted from 8-inch to 5.25-inch floppy disks and integrated with the BIOS , which Microsoft was helping IBM to write. IBM had more people writing requirements for the computer than Microsoft had writing code. O'Rear often felt overwhelmed by
6552-461: Was previously assigned to one of the extended partition logical drives. Moreover, even adding a new hard drive having only logical drives in an extended partition would still disrupt the letters of RAM disks and optical drives. This problem persisted through Microsoft's DOS-based 9x versions of Windows until they were replaced by versions based on the NT line, which preserves the letters of existing drives until
6636-467: Was reconfigurable as well. Filenames ended with a colon ( : ) such as NUL: conventionally indicate device names, but the colon is not actually a part of the name of the built-in device drivers. Colons are not necessary to be typed in some cases, for example: It is still possible to create files or directories using these reserved device names, such as through direct editing of directory data structures in disk sectors. Such naming, such as starting
6720-532: Was released on 3 September 2006. Made available under the GNU General Public License (GPL), FreeDOS does not require license fees or royalties. Early versions of Microsoft Windows ran on MS-DOS. By the early 1990s, the Windows graphical shell saw heavy use on new DOS systems. In 1995, Windows 95 was bundled as a standalone operating system that did not require a separate DOS license. Windows 95 (and Windows 98 and ME, that followed it) took over as
6804-560: Was released. In October 1983 (officially 1 November 1983) DOS 2.1 debuted. It fixed some bugs and added support for half-height floppy drives and the new IBM PCjr . In 1983, Compaq released the Compaq Portable , the first 100% IBM PC compatible and licensed their own OEM version of DOS 1.10 (quickly replaced by DOS 2.00) from Microsoft. Other PC compatibles followed suit, most of which included hardware-specific DOS features, although some were generic. In August 1984, IBM introduced
6888-412: Was structured such that there was a separation between the system specific device driver code ( IO.SYS ) and the DOS kernel ( MSDOS.SYS ). Microsoft provided an OEM Adaptation Kit (OAK) which allowed OEMs to customize the device driver code to their particular system. By the early 1990s, most PCs adhered to IBM PC standards so Microsoft began selling a retail version of MS-DOS, starting with MS-DOS 5.0. In
6972-461: Was then sent to Digital Research, and a meeting was set up. However, initial negotiations for the use of CP/M broke down: Digital Research wished to sell CP/M on a royalty basis, while IBM sought a single license, and to change the name to "PC DOS". Digital Research founder Gary Kildall refused, and IBM withdrew. IBM again approached Bill Gates. Gates in turn approached Seattle Computer Products . There, programmer Tim Paterson had developed
7056-518: Was unused and removed in DOS 5.0. DOS also supported Block Devices ("Disk Drive" devices) loaded from CONFIG.SYS that could be used under the DOS file system to support network devices. In DOS, drives are referred to by identifying letters. Standard practice is to reserve "A" and "B" for floppy drives . On systems with only one floppy drive DOS assigns both letters to the drive, prompting the user to swap disks as programs alternate access between them. This facilitates copying from floppy to floppy or having
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