2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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MS-DOS
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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/MSdos/ , n. [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A clone of CP/M for the 8088
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crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer
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Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System)
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and is said to have regretted it ever since. Microsoft licensed QDOS in
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order to have something to demo for IBM on time, and the rest is history.
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Numerous features, including vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for
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subdirectories, I/O redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's
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2.0 and subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
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versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never agree on
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basic things like what character to use as an option switch or whether to be
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case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now the highest-unit-volume
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OS in history. Often known simply as DOS, which annoys people familiar with
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other similarly abbreviated operating systems (the name goes back to the
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mid-1960s, when it was attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the
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360). The name further annoys those who know what the term operating system
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does (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively simple
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interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like dose , as in I
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don't work on dose, man! , or to compare it to a dose of brain-damaging
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drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation among hackers exhorts: MS-DOS:
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Just say No! ). See mess-dos.
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