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, ...

In the annals of PC history, IBM’s OS/2 represents a road not taken. Developed in the waning days of IBM’s partnership with Microsoft—the same partnership that had given us a decade or so of MS-DOS ...

The reason Microsoft became so big comes down to the best deal ever made in the history of computing, between the fledgling software company co-founded by Bill Gates and the behemoth hardware giant ...

Like the old-fangled BIOS (which is slowly being phased out with the help of EFI), the DOS operating system is a piece of computing history that refuses to be only history. While most folks will never ...

Microsoft and IBM’s DOS operating system is an important milestone in the history of personal computing, and it’s just as important that we can dig into it and see what makes it tick. That’s part of ...

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 ...

In brief: A YouTuber has demonstrated the ability to run the venerable MS-DOS operating system and classic games directly on modern computer hardware without any emulation. This blast from the past ...

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 ...

A command-line interface is a terminal-style screen where you type commands at a prompt, one line at a time. You might associate it with the MS-DOS operating system that was widely used until the ...

Update, July 5, 2021: It's the July 4 holiday weekend in the US, which means Ars staff gets a well-deserved holiday to catch up on this summer's Steam sale (or maybe just to rest). As such, we're ...