DOS /dɒs/, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 including the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.
Related systems include MS-DOS, PC DOS and its ancestor 86-DOS, DR-DOS (including PalmDOS, Novell DOS and OpenDOS), FreeDOS and RxDOS as well as PTS-DOS, ROM-DOS, Embedded DOS, NXDOS and ZDOS.
In spite of the common usage, none of these systems were simply named "DOS" (a name given only to an unrelated IBM mainframe operating system in the 1960s). A number of unrelated, non-x86 microcomputer disk operating systems had "DOS" in their name, and are often referred to simply as "DOS" when discussing machines that use them (e.g. AmigaDOS, AMSDOS, ANDOS, Apple DOS, Atari DOS, Commodore DOS, CSI-DOS, ProDOS, and TRS-DOS). While providing many of the same operating system functions for their respective computer systems, programs running under any one of these operating systems would not run under others.
Read more about DOS: Design, User Interface, Software, See Also
Famous quotes containing the word dos:
“Love is cheap. You can buy it anywhere. Lives are cheap. It’s money that’s dear. You have to work days and sit up nights thinking how to make money.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Why wont they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, cant they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping—rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year’s and Easter and Christmas—But, goodness, why need they do it?”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)