Earlier this month, I spent a day working in the throwback world of DOS. More specifically, it was FreeDOS version 1.1, the open source version of the long-defunct Microsoft MS-DOS operating system.

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 the annals of PC history, IBM’s OS/2 represents a road not taken. Developed in the waning days of IBM’s partnership with Microsoft—the same partnership that had given us a decade or so of MS-DOS ...

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 ...

A forensic computing researcher may have settled one of tech's longest standing controversies: whether the original version of Microsoft's seminal MS-DOS operating system contained code copied from an ...

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 ...

A command-line interface is a terminal-style screen where you type commands at a prompt, one line at a time. You might associate it with the MS-DOS operating system that was widely used until the ...

July 20, 1978: Apple DOS makes its debut on the Apple II, giving Apple its first official operating system. A command line interface with green text prompts on a black background, Apple DOS looks ...