MS-DOS is 30 years old today

[A Guy]

Thirty years ago, on July 27 1981, Microsoft bought the rights for QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for $25,000. QDOS, otherwise known as 86-DOS, was designed by SCP to run on the Intel 8086 processor, and was originally thrown together in just two months for a 0.1 release in 1980. Meanwhile, IBM had planned on powering its upcoming Personal Computer with CP/M-86, which had been the standard OS for Intel 8086 and 8080 architectures at the time, but a deal could not be struck with CP/M’s developer, Digital Research. IBM then approached Microsoft, which already had a few years of experience under its belt with M-DOS, BASIC, and other important tools — and as you can probably tell from the landscape of the computer world today, the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed.

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A Guy

 

[Beta]

Wow, it just shows you how far we have come in the past 30 years. Ms-Dos disks are still in use today. Will Windows 7 still be relivent as Dos was? I do not think so. Perhaps people will still be running XP in 30 years. lol.

It also make you think how slow things have changed in the past 10 years. People are still running Windows XP which is 10 years old. Many of those PC from 2001 can run Windows 7 but PCs from 1991 could never run XP. I think the big bang in computers is over and the amount of change will be much slower.

 

[Coke Robot]

Wow, it just shows you how far we have come in the past 30 years. Ms-Dos disks are still in use today. Will Windows 7 still be relivent as Dos was? I do not think so. Perhaps people will still be running XP in 30 years. lol.

It also make you think how slow things have changed in the past 10 years. People are still running Windows XP which is 10 years old. Many of those PC from 2001 can run Windows 7 but PCs from 1991 could never run XP. I think the big bang in computers is over and the amount of change will be much slower.

Gee, I never actually thought about that fact! Thank you 32 bit processor architecture, for lasting such a long time that every software had and has to be written to work with it.

 

[Coke Robot]

DOS is actually older than me.....

So what happens when it turns 50? Does it have a mid-life crisis and crash and needs to be rebooted?

 

[Borg 386]

Oh yes, that brings back memories....Damn I'm old!

 

[kado897]

Oh yes, that brings back memories....Damn I'm old!

It certainly does. We got one of the first IBM PCs mainly to use the 123 (I think it was called) spreadsheet. Seems pathetic now but at the time, wow...

 

[Magron]

Microsoft's first sale was to Tandy for the TRS series. My model 3 (with the FULL 64K of ram) had MS/Tandy Dos, partly in rom, partly on disk.

In the interests of historical accuracy, gates is not the self made man everybody wants to think.
He comes from a very well connected old money family and those connections are what got him in the door at Tandy and IBM where nobody else could.