As the forerunner to the graphical user interfaces in Microsoft’s Windows platform, MS-DOS helped set the stage for the company’s dominance in the PC software market. When MS-DOS was released in 1981, ...

Linux is very good at running older software, but even the free and open-source operating system is stumped by the really ancient stuff developed for MS-DOS. Let’s go over how you can get ...

In context: Back in 1980, Tim Paterson was creating a new operating system he called QDOS or Quick and Dirty Operating System. The system was later renamed 86-DOS, as it was being designed to run on ...

Like the old-fangled BIOS (which is slowly being phased out with the help of EFI), the DOS operating system is a piece of computing history that refuses to be only history. While most folks will never ...

Tony Smith puns it up, with “Kudos to QDOS”: On 27 July 1981, Microsoft gave the name MS-DOS to the…operating system it acquired on that day from Seattle Computer Products (SCP). … The company had ...

Update, July 5, 2021: It's the July 4 holiday weekend in the US, which means Ars staff gets a well-deserved holiday to catch up on this summer's Steam sale (or maybe just to rest). As such, we're ...

It's no joke. Microsoft and IBM have joined forces to open-source the 1988 operating system MS-DOS 4.0 under the MIT License. Why? Well, why not? That got Hanselman and Wilcox digging into the ...

Multi-platform solutions are increasingly necessary in this modern era of multi-vendor networks and client/server computing. For many users, their "dream machine" would combine a DOS/Windows PC and a ...

Lordy, lordy, look who’s 40! Happy birthday, Unix — you’re looking great for your age. You certainly weren’t the first operating system on any platform, but you managed to stride from the minicomputer ...