MS-DOS

MS-DOS (short for Microsoft Disk Operating System) is an operating system commercialized by Microsoft. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems and was the main operating system for personal computers during the 1980s. It was preceded by M-DOS(also call MIDAS), designed and copyrighted by Microsoft in 1979. MSDOS was based on the Intel 8086 family of microprocessors, particularly theIBM PC and compatibles. It was gradually replaced on consumer desktop computers by operating systems offering a graphical user interface (GUI), in particular by various generations of the Microsoft Windows operating system and Linux. MS-DOS was known before as QDOS(Quick and Dirty Operating System) and 86-DOS.^[1]

MS-DOS development originally started in 1981,^[2] and was first released in 1982 as MS-DOS 1.0.^[2] Several versions were released under different names for different hardware.^[3]

MS-DOS had eight major versions released before Microsoft stopped development in 2000. It was the key product in Microsoft's growth from a programming languages company to a diverse software development firm, providing the company with essential revenue and marketing resources. It was also the underlying basic operating system on which early versions of Windows ran as a GUI.