MS-DOS
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MS-DOS


Show me everything on Windows legacy operating systems

DEFINITION -

Also see Disk Operating System.

MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) was the Microsoft-marketed version of the first widely-installed operating system in personal computers. It was essentially the same operating system that Bill Gates's young company developed for IBM as Personal Computer - Disk Operating System (PC-DOS). Most users of either DOS system simply referred to their system as Disk Operating System. Like PC-DOS, MS-DOS was (and still is) a non-graphical line-oriented command-driven operating system, with a relatively simple interface but not overly "friendly" user interface. Its prompt to enter a command looks like this:

C:>
The first Microsoft Windows operating system was really an application that ran on top of the MS-DOS operating system. Today, Windows operating systems continue to support DOS (or a DOS-like user interface) for special purposes by emulating the operating system.

In the 1970s before the personal computer was invented, IBM had a different and unrelated DOS that ran on smaller business computers. It was replaced by IBM's VSE operating system.

Learn more about Windows legacy operating systems
Vista security option changes to named pipe access: Read about Windows Vista's improved named pipe security in this excerpt from Mark Minasi's book, Administering Windows Vista Security: The Big Surprises.
Learning Guides from SearchWinIT.com: Check out our selection of Learning Guides to get extensive information on Active Directory, Group Policy, malware, Windows 2003 migration and more!
How to get an attacker out of your network: This excerpt from Chapter 2 of "Protect Your Windows Network from Perimeter to Data," by Jesper Johansson and Steve Riley, is about.securing networks by understanding how hackers take advantage of ...
Taking over the domain: This excerpt from Chapter 2 of "Protect Your Windows Network from Perimeter to Data," by Jesper Johansson and Steve Riley, is about.securing networks by understanding how hackers take advantage of ...
Access control checklists: These checklists will help you lock down Windows access control settings.

CONTRIBUTORS: Jacob Ghitis, M.D
LAST UPDATED: 04 Nov 2008

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More resources from around the web:
- For a glimpse of the DOS command interface, see Everett Murdock's DOS Command Index , which lists and describes many DOS commands.





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