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, ...

Earlier this month, I spent a day working in the throwback world of DOS. More specifically, it was FreeDOS version 1.1, the open source version of the long-defunct Microsoft MS-DOS operating system.

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 ...

Two big things happened in the world of text-based disk operating systems in June 1994. The first is that Microsoft released MS-DOS version 6.22, the last version of its long-running operating system ...

It’s been decades since Microsoft stopped developing MS-DOS, but there are thousands of old DOS applications that aren’t designed to run on newer operating systems like Windows 10. Enter FreeDOS, a ...

FreeDOS is an open source operating system that allows you to run MS-DOS applications even though Microsoft stopped developing and supporting MS-DOS more than two decades ago. While FreeDOS has been ...

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 ...

Windows is probably the most consequential software ever created. It for nearly four decades, it has run the computers that we use to learn, create, defend our country, heal the sick, and look at ...

Editor’s note: After this article was published, Microsoft issued a statement clarifying that cmd.exe will not be going away after all. Read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ follow-up column. My very first ...

Halcyon DOS Days: Back in the command prompt days, DR-DOS was one of the main competitors to MS-DOS in the operating system market. Those days are long gone, but a mysterious developer is reviving the ...