MS-DOS Is 30 Years Old Today

[ThePitt]

Thirty years ago, on July 27 1981, Microsoft bought the rights for QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for $25,000. QDOS, otherwise known as 86-DOS, was designed by SCP to run on the Intel 8086 processor, and was originally thrown together in just two months for a 0.1 release in 1980. Meanwhile, IBM had planned on powering its upcoming Personal Computer with CP/M-86, which had been the standard OS for Intel 8086 and 8080 architectures at the time, but a deal could not be struck with CP/M?s developer, Digital Research. IBM then approached Microsoft, which already had a few years of experience under its belt with M-DOS, BASIC, and other important tools ? and as you can probably tell from the landscape of the computer world today, the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed.

IBM released its Personal Computer in August 1981 running version 1.14 of SCP?s QDOS ? but a few months later Microsoft produced MS-DOS 1.24, which then became the standard IBM PC operating system. In March 1983, both MS-DOS 2.0 and the IBM PC/XT were released. The rest, as they say, is history. MS-DOS 3.0 followed in 1984 (alongside the IBM PC/AT), and MS-DOS 4.0 with a mouse-powered, menu-driven interface arrived in 1989. It?s around this point that IBM?s PC operating system, PC-DOS, began to diverge from MS-DOS ? and of course, come 1990, Microsoft released Windows 3.0, which would change Microsoft?s focus forever. It?s also around this time that developers start to feel the pinch of the 640KB conventional memory limit imposed by IBM?s original hardware specifications.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/91202-ms-dos-is-30-years-old-today

[.Neo]

Has to be the most terrible and user-unfriendly operating system I've ever used.

[_neutrino Veteran]

woot.

[MFH]

Has to be the most terrible and user-unfriendly operating system I've ever used.

So you never tried UNIX?

[Growled Member]

Hard to believe it's that old. It's even harder to believe we have one computer still running it at work.