As the forerunner to the graphical user interfaces in Microsoft’s Windows platform, MS-DOS helped set the stage for the company’s dominance in the PC software market. When MS-DOS was released in 1981, ...

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 ...

An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt. Impact Link Before Microsoft had Office, before it had Windows, it had an operating system called MS DOS. MS DOS was a command-line operating system, meaning ...

30 years ago today, Microsoft bought the rights to the Quick and Dirty OS, re-branded it as MS-DOS, struck a deal with IBM, and made history. Share on Facebook (opens in a new window) Share on X ...

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 ...

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 ...