MS-DOS

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:>

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.

Read more about MS-DOS: - For a glimpse of the DOS command interface, see Everett Murdock's DOS Command Index , which lists and describes many DOS commands. - SearchWin2000.com has a collection of Internet links related to MS-DOS.

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