DOS/Trivia


Trivia about DOS includes:

  • 86-DOS was originally named QDOS, for "Quick and Dirty Operating System". Paterson's employer, Seattle Computer Products, understandably changed the name when it went commercial.
  • MS-DOS assigns a letter of the alphabet to each drive mounted, and treats them all separately. By default, A and B are reserved for floppies and C is the first hard drive. As of 2024, Windows systems still name their first local hard drive "C:".
    • A lot of DOS PCs were shipped with one floppy and one hard drive. In these boxes, DOS assigns both A: and B: to the floppy drive to make disk-juggling easier.
  • The last version of MS-DOS released was 8.0, which was the base for Windows ME.
    • the last stand-alone version was 6.22.
    • The first version to be marketed directly to end-users was 5.0.
    • Version 3.3 (not to be confused with Apple DOS 3.3) was the first to support 3.5", 1.44MiB floppy disks. Enthusiasts still recommend it for vintage floppy-only systems, partly because of its low memory usage.
  • MS-DOS 6.0 - 6.22 came with a bundled virus-checker, MSAV/MWAV (licensed, ultimately, from Carmel Software). It was basic and quickly forgotten, but might have made a small dent in Microsoft's reputation for not caring about security.
  • For decades there was a rumour that early 86/MS-DOS versions contained code illegaly copied from CP/M. It was eventually debunked by executable and, later, source code comparisons.
Back to DOS
This article is issued from All The Tropes. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.