Really I need to know..........
2007-03-04 21:12:46 · 5 answers · asked by dervin 3 in Computers & Internet ➔ Software
DOS was the original operating system for the IBM based PC.
It stans for "Disk Operating System"
This is because before there were hard drives, you could boot and run the computer from floppy drives. DOS when setup as a bootable disk, had enough data to make a computer operate without any additional information. We called DOS a CLI or Command Line Interface. This means that everything you needed to do in DOS had to be typed in at a command prompt. To copy a file you had to type "copy file1 file2", now we click and right click with a mouse to do this. However you can still open a "cmd" prompt and do a command line copy in all current versions of windows!
DOS did not have a GUI which is what Windows is considered. GUI stands for "graphical user interface" = the original version of windows was Windows 3.1 (3.0 never really released because they got in trouble for making it not run on a certain brand) The original Windows 3.1 or also Windows for Workgroups which was a networkable version of windows ran on top of DOS.
So DOS used to load first, then Windows would load on top of it. This changed when Windows 95 came out. Basically Windows 95 booted and used a DOS Shell instead of the other way. Thats pretty much how Windows has worked since. Except for Windows NT which used a hardware abstraction layer to communicate with hardware. Windows 95, 98 and ME all talked directly to the computers hardware. Whereas Windows NT 3.5x, 4.0, 2000, windows XP and now Windows Vista all used the HAL to talk to the hardware. This was important because some programs could easily crash the entire system by making an invalid call to something like the video card or audio card. The main problem was memory management though.
2007-03-04 21:16:09 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 0⤋
What Does Dos Do
2017-01-09 09:59:08 · answer #2 · answered by heckel 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
DOS was the first real operating system in use in the '80s. Bill Gates purchased the rights to this operating system for about $50,000 which he barrowed from his parents. He spent about 6 months re-writing the basic code for this operating system and in turn licensed copies to IBM for use in the 8086 based computers (if I remember right). The rest is history as you are using new versions of DOS. as far as I know the last version of DOS was version 7 which shipped with Windows ME. All newer versions of DOS are just a shell and can not be run via a true command line.
2007-03-05 00:43:46 · answer #3 · answered by mcgranem 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
DOS commonly refers to the family of closely related operating systems which dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995 (or until about 2000, if Windows versions 95, 98, and M.E. are included) : PC-DOS, MS-DOS, FreeDOS, DR-DOS, Novell-DOS, OpenDOS, PTS-DOS, ROM-DOS and several others. They are single user, single task systems. MS-DOS from Microsoft was the most widely used. These operating systems ran on IBM PC type hardware using the Intel x86 CPUs or their compatible cousins from other makers. MS-DOS is still common today and was the foundation for many of Microsoft's operating systems (from Windows 1.0 through Windows Me). MS-DOS was later abandoned as the foundation for their operating systems.
2007-03-04 21:27:57 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
Dos is your mainframe. type in dir to see. control alt delete will kill it so dont do that.
2007-03-04 21:18:28 · answer #5 · answered by JAMI E 5 · 0⤊ 2⤋