Brief History of MS-DOS

In the early 1970's a new kind of storage device was developed. This device, due to its physical structure was called the Disk Drive. A large number of companies got involved in the race for the development of a new system using these disks. The first operating system that used the disk drives as the main storage device came out in mid 70's. It was called as Control Program for Micro Computer (C.P./M.). In 1981, IBM developed the Personal Computer (P.C.). The IBM PC used the Intel 8088 (Micro Processor) CPU and the operating system developed by Microsoft Corporation, Washington for this PC was turned to be the Micro Soft Disk Operating System. It was called the DOS version 1.0. This operation system worked with single sided floppy disks (180 K.Bytes).

Important Features of MS-DOS   
MS-DOS has been used in most of the microcomputers. It has got the following important  features :
1. MS-DOS supports various computer languages (i.e machine independent)
2. It is a single user operating system.
3. It supports both floppy disks and hard disks drives.
4. Hierarchy of files (precedence order of files) are possible.
5. Flexible file allocation feature exits.
6. It supports pipes 2 and I/O (Input/Output) redirection.
7. Co-existence of MS-DOS with other operating system (e.g. Novel) is possible.
8. Printer spooler may be supported b y MS-DOS.
9. Now versions have addition facilities and features.