View Source: MS-DOS - Waikato Linux Users Group

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[Acronym] for [Microsoft] [DOS].

This is [Microsoft]'s original PersonalComputer OperatingSystem.

When [IBM] were about to throw the PersonalComputer into the market, they were looking for an existing OperatingSystem to buy from someone. There is an anecdote that some [IBM] representants found the Digital Research office closed, whom they were really looking to seal a deal with, so without any serious consideration they also visited this BillGates at his [Microsoft] company, which back then was tiny. The tactics were already the known ones though - though Gates didn't even have any code, he talked [IBM] into buying vapourware.

Then he bought some programmer's personal project called QDOS: Quick & Dirty Operating System. The original code had been written by him outside [Microsoft] in two weeks. [Microsoft] souped it up it and presented it to [IBM] as the PC-DOS.

Thus began the victory of hodgepodge crap pushed into the market.

Later, [Microsoft] tricked [IBM] to free [DOS] of its contractual bonds, effectively stealing it back, and marketted their own version under the name [MS-DOS].

Nowadays, [DOS] is obsolete; there are however still applications that depend on it, particularly in embedded devices, so the [FreeDOS project | http://www.freedos.org/] are working at creating a [Free] clone.

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CategoryOperatingSystem

12 pages link to MS-DOS:

Last edited on Monday, January 5, 2004 9:27:16 am by AristotlePagaltzis

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