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The acronym DOS stands for disk operating system, a type of operating system for computers that provides the abstraction of a file system resident on hard disk or floppy disk secondary storage.

1 DOS for IBM PC compatibles

In particular, DOS refers to the family of related operating systems which dominated the IBM PC compatible market for the decade between 1985 and 1995: PC-DOS, MS-DOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS, PTS-DOS, and several others.

MS-DOS (and the IBM PC-DOS which was licensed therefrom), and its predecessor, QDOS, was a successor to CP/M (Command Processor / (for) Microcomputers)—which was the dominant operating system for 8-bit Intel 8080The Intel 8080 was an early microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. The 8-bit CPU was released in April 1974 running at 2 MHz, and is generally considered to be the first truly usable microprocessor CPU design. Description The Intel 8080 was th and Zilog Z80 based microcomputers.

Early versions of Microsoft WindowsImage use policy. Microsoft Windows is a range of commercial operating environments for personal computers. The range was first introduced by Microsoft in 1985 and eventually has come to dominate the world personal computer market. All recent versions of were programs which ran under DOS. Later versions were launched under DOS but "extended" it by going into protected mode. Still later versions of MS Windows ran independently of DOS but included much of the old code such that it could run in virtual machineIn general terms, a virtual machine in computer science is software that creates an environment between the computer platform and the end user in which the end user can operate software. Specifically, the term virtual machine has several distinct meaningss under the new OS and the latest versions of MS Windows are continually dropping ever more of the DOS ancestry. Windows 98 was the last Microsoft OS to run on DOS.

Under LinuxThis article is about Linux-based operating systems, GNU/Linux, and related topics. See Linux kernel for the kernel itself. See Linux (washing powder) for the Swiss brand of washing powder. Tux, a plump penguin, is the official Linux mascot Linux is the n (running on x86x86 or Intel 80x86 is the generic name of a microprocessor architecture first developed and manufactured by Intel. The architecture is called x86 because Intel used to give the earliest processors in this family numeric brand names ending in the sequence-based systems) it's possible to run copies of DOS and many of its clones under dosemu (a Linux native virtual machine program for running real mode programs). There are a number of other emulators for running DOS and/or DOS-based software under various versions of UNIX, even on non-x86 platforms; one such emulator is DOSBox.

See also: List of DOS commands



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