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 ...

A forensic computing researcher may have settled one of tech's longest standing controversies: whether the original version of Microsoft's seminal MS-DOS operating system contained code copied from an ...

That iconic black screen and blinking cursor are no longer in active use, but they're hardly forgotten. It was 30 years ago today that Microsoft released DOS to the world, but the things that happened ...

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 ...

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 ...

Without Microsoft, the world of modern computer technology would not be the same as we know it. Next year, Microsoft turns 50 years old, so it’s worth looking back at the megacorporation’s significant ...

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 ...

July 20, 1978: Apple DOS makes its debut on the Apple II, giving Apple its first official operating system. A command line interface with green text prompts on a black background, Apple DOS looks ...

The year was 1983. Microsoft was slowly becoming a well-known tech company in the PC space. Two years before, in 1981, Its MS-DOS operating system would be installed in the first IBM PC. It launched ...