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 ...

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 ...

Editor’s note: After this article was published, Microsoft issued a statement clarifying that cmd.exe will not be going away after all. Read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ follow-up column. My very first ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

It’s been decades since Microsoft stopped developing MS-DOS, but there are thousands of old DOS applications that aren’t designed to run on newer operating systems like Windows 10. Enter FreeDOS, a ...

Tony Smith puns it up, with “Kudos to QDOS”: On 27 July 1981, Microsoft gave the name MS-DOS to the…operating system it acquired on that day from Seattle Computer Products (SCP). … The company had ...

Back in the early ‘90s, at the television station where I worked, we had a newsroom computer system that the reporters, anchors, and producers used to write and produce the newscasts. The system ...