At first, many people would answer saying that DOS has no future. It has seen
it's heyday and now it's up to high-resolution GUI's (Graphic User-Interfaces
- e.g. Windows 95) to lead the operating system pack. But let's not be too quick
to dismiss it. There are many reasons why DOS is an essential part of many of
today's finest systems.
Talk to mainstream computer industry "specialists" and they'd have
you believe that there is no longer any place for it. Why? Because they don't
understand the special speed and performance requirements unique to systems
other than "supercomputers with neuro-networking". I'm talking about
the many hundreds of thousands of users that depend on older systems to support
their businesses. Low-tech industries rely heavily on computers with old versions
of DOS installed on them. The average "business person" here doesn't
need anything better than a 486SX with 8MB of RAM t
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In May 1982, Microsoft released MS-DOS v1.1 to IBM, for the IBM PC. It supported
320KB double-sided floppy disk drives. Microsoft also released MS-DOS v1.25,
similar to v1.1 but for IBM-compatible computers.
In March 1983, MS-DOS v2.0 for PCs is announced. It was written from scratch,
supporting 10 MB hard drives, a tree-structured file system, and 360 KB floppy
disks. October saw IBM introducing PC-DOS v2.1 with the IBM PCjr.
In March 1984, Microsoft released MS-DOS v2.1 for the IBM PCjr. Microsoft released
MS-DOS v2.11 a short time later. It included enhancements to better allow conversion
into different languages and date formats. In August, Microsoft released MS-DOS
v3.0 for PCs. It added support for 1.2MB floppy disks, and bigger (than 10 MB)
hard disks. In November, Microsoft released MS-DOS v3.1, adding support for
Microsoft networks.
In January 1986, Microsoft released MS-DOS v3.2. It
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About a decade ago, standard memory configurations were 256KB, 512KB or 640KB
on computers. This memory was often looked at in segments of 65536 bytes or
64KB. The user is allocated 10 segments, or 640KB and the system is allocated
the remaining 6, or 384KB. The original designers of the 8088, decided that
no one would ever possibly need more than 1MB of memory (yeah, right!). So they
built the machine so that it couldn't access above 1 MB. To access the whole
MEG, 20 bits are needed. This allows a total of 220 combinations of bits, that
is 1048576 (= 1024*1024 or 1 MB) different numbers, each of which represents
an address of a single byte of data. The problem was that the registers only
had 16 bits, and if they used two registers, that would be 32 bits, which was
way too much (they thought). So they came up with a rather brilliant (not!)
way to do their addressing - they would use two registers. They de
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When a computer is turned on an Operating System must be loaded into the computer's
memory before the user can begin using it. IBM compatible machines use an operating
system called MS-DOS. MS stands for "MicroSoft" (a trade name), while
DOS stands for "Disk Operating System", which tells us that it's original
purpose was to provide an interface between a computer and its disk drives.
Technically, DOS is a high-level interface between an application program and
the computer.
DOS has been extended further, allowing programs to handle the likes of simple
memory management, disk operations, assorted system tasks (e.g. date/time),
user input commands and managing input/output (i/o) devices (i.e. it provides
operating instructions for the computer to manage both hardware and software).
Versions 3.1 and up also provide basic networking functions.
Beyond this, DOS provides the user with the important
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