What is DOS?

A package (OS) is that the package that controls a computer's hardware and peripheral devices and permits alternative programs to operate. Early computers didn't have disk drives however were hard-wired to hold out specific computations. Later, computers were ready to store directions loaded into the computer's memory victimization punch cards and later magnetic tapes. The computer storage house was restricted. Once the directions to regulate a laptop were moved onto a Winchester drive, like a diskette or internal disk drive, it had been thought-about stylish technology. Today, any fashionable package would be thought about as a disk package.

Disk package is additionally wont to describe many terribly similar program line disk operative systems. PC-DOS (Personal laptop Disk operative System) was the primary widely-installed disk package employed in personal computers running on Intel 8086 16-bit processors. It was developed for IBM by Microsoft Corporation, which conjointly created its own virtually identical version of DOS. alternative computers at the time, like the commissioned naval officer sixty-four, Atari 800, and Apple II, all featured a disk package, CBM DOS, Atari DOS, and Apple DOS, severally. (DOS/360 was Associate in Nursing package for IBM mainframes that 1st appeared in 1966. However, it is unrelated to the 8086-based DOS of the Nineteen Eighties.

These early operative systems didn't multitask, as they were solely ready to run one program at a time. The program line interface, within which a user needs to sort in commands, needed the user to recollect commands to run programs or do alternative package tasks, creating it tough for novices to use. as an example, writing the command "cd \directory_name" modified the present operating directory to the named directory and writing the command "dir" listed the files within the current directory.

When Microsoft 1st introduced Windows as a graphical program (GUI) for DOS, early users had to sort "WIN" at the DOS prompt to launch the Windows program. Windows has since evolved from a graphical user interface program running beneath DOS to a full package taking up because of the default OS. It had been not till Windows XP that shopper versions of Windows stopped hoping on the DOS program win.com to bootstrap the Windows kernel.

The last retail version of DOS was DOS vi.22. when this unleash, DOS was still bundled as a part of Windows. However, it now does not need a separate license. It will still be run beneath Windows victimization the prompt program. There's an Associate in Nursing open supply version of DOS referred to as FreeDOS predicated on and compatible with DOS.

Note: The form DoS with a little O is brief for Denial of Service, a technique of assaultive a networked laptop by causing it Associate in the Nursing abnormally high range of requests to exhaust its resources so that real users cannot gain access.