MS-DOS stands for MicroSoft Disk Operating System (DOS for short). DOS became the most common disk-based operating system on the market due to the marketing genious of Bill Gates. Bill negotiated with several companies, including IBM to have his operating system pre-installed on every Intel-based computer. This meant that everyone was buying his operating system every time they bought a new PC.
DOS is a command line driven application. This means you are given a window with a prompt where you type commands and wait for results. DOS was not originally intended to be used with a mouse and it is not really graphical, although towards the end of it's lifespan, it did support the mouse in a limited fashion, and could show what looked like graphical windows, but the displays were still character-based drawings.
- Bootstrap process
- Filesystem
- Filenames
- Commands
MS-DOS is no longer produced by Microsoft as a stand-alone operating system. DOS is now shipped with every version of Microsoft's Windows operating systems as "cmd.exe".