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Chapter 1 DOS

DOS (Disk Operating System) refers to operating systems used for personal computers developed in 1981 by Microsoft for IBM PCs. It has a command line interface like Unix but is less powerful, only supporting single-user usage without multi-tasking. While less user-friendly than modern graphical interfaces, some DOS commands can still be used in current Windows versions. There are two types of commands in DOS - internal commands embedded in command.com and external commands requiring separate files like fdisk.exe to run.

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164 views

Chapter 1 DOS

DOS (Disk Operating System) refers to operating systems used for personal computers developed in 1981 by Microsoft for IBM PCs. It has a command line interface like Unix but is less powerful, only supporting single-user usage without multi-tasking. While less user-friendly than modern graphical interfaces, some DOS commands can still be used in current Windows versions. There are two types of commands in DOS - internal commands embedded in command.com and external commands requiring separate files like fdisk.exe to run.

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teenatweety
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Chapter 1-DOS

-Twesha Chharia

An acronym for Disk Operating System, in a general sense, DOS refers to just about any operating system. More commonly, it describes the operating system Microsoft developed in 1981 for IBM's line of personal computers.

Though syntactically distinct, DOS shares similarities with a Unix shell. It has a command-line interface and analogs to many common Unix commands. However, DOS is a 16-bit, single-user operating system that does not support multi-tasking.

It is far easier to administer than Unix, but less powerful. Compared to graphical interfaces such as Windows and Mac OS X, it's also not particularly user-friendly.

With the development of Windows, MS-DOS has faded in importance. However, you can still run some DOS commands at the command prompt in current versions of Windows, which can be useful in situations where a graphical interface is less efficient.

In MS-DOS there are two ways commands are executed. An Internal command, which is a command embedded into the command.com file, and an external command, which is not embedded into command.com and therefore requires a separate file to be used.

For example, if your computer does not have fdisk.exe and you try using the fdisk command, you would receive an error "Bad command or file name." Fdisk is an external command that will only work if fdisk.exe, or in some cases, fdisk.com, is present.

However, as long as MS-DOS is running on your computer internal commands such as the cd command will always be available and does not require any other files to run.

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