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Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Before Windows, there was MS-DOS—that’s the Microsoft Disk ...

Before Windows introduced its modern GUI system, Microsoft was well-known for its iconic command-line operating system, MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

Reader Steve P. sends in this question: “I’m running Windows 2000 and want to upgrade my system BIOS. The instructions say to create a bootable disk with the format a:/s command. However, the /s doesn ...

It's no joke. Microsoft and IBM have joined forces to open-source the 1988 operating system MS-DOS 4.0 under the MIT License. Why? Well, why not? That got Hanselman and Wilcox digging into the ...

MS-DOS or Microsoft Disk Operating System was the dominant operating system for Personal Computer throughout the 80s. MS-DOS is a non-graphical command line operating system. MS-DOS allows the user to ...

FreeDOS is an open source operating system that allows you to run MS-DOS applications even though Microsoft stopped developing and supporting MS-DOS more than two decades ago. While FreeDOS has been ...

How was DOS part of the PC revolution? Is DOS still around? What did Bill write a long time ago? Remember the DOS prompt? DOS stands for disk operating system. The latest announcement is a blast from ...

Two big things happened in the world of text-based disk operating systems in June 1994. The first is that Microsoft released MS-DOS version 6.22, the last version of its long-running operating system ...

TL;DR: Microsoft will likely never release the original source code of Windows into the wild, but the company is clearly interested in sharing important episodes of its software development history.

They’ve been outdated since the arrival of Windows 95, and aren’t always easy to get running on a modern PC. But MS-DOS games—those designed to launch from Microsoft’s old text-based operating ...