The History of the DOS Operating System

Video Transcript

"I'm Jonathan Ayres with Network for Success and today we're going to talk about the history of DOS operating system. The DOS operating system really which stands for Disk Operation System - D-O-S was an offshoot of the original CPM operating system that was built and designed by Digital Research Institutes in nineteen-seventy-nine. Now Digital Research Institute had designed this eight bit system for computers that ran the CPM operating system, and it was not being updated. Digital Research didn't keep up with moving ahead with the times and they didn't make any improvements on it. And a young fellow named Tim Patterson was asked to design a better program, and so he designed eighty-six DOS using many of the same routines from CPM but also fixing a lot of the problems. One of the problems with the CPM operating system was that if you took a disk out without writing the information to it, you corrupted everything. So he fixed that problem and the eighty-six DOS operating system might be a little slower but it was certainly a lot better and once the eighty-six DOS operating system had been written, IBM found out about it and at that point they tried to make a deal with Digital Research to get a hold of it and were not successful. A year later in nineteen-eighty-two, a guy named Bill Gates bought the rights to use it, non-exclusive rights to use the eighty-six DOS operating system from Seattle Computer Products who then owned it. He bought the rights to it and then changed it over to Microsoft DOS and sold the rights to use it to IBM. And it changed over to some various transformations, IBM turned it into PC DOS and Microsoft kept developing MS DOS through seven versions. And there were even some offshoots that were one of them was named Doctor DOS which a lot of people remember with endearment because it was a great operating system, much better than PC DOS or MS DOS. So this is an operating system that really was in the forefront of personal computer development. It ran on the eighty-eighty-eight and eighty-eighty-six computers which were eight and sixteen bit computers in the old days. Back in the nineteen-eighties, this would be nineteen-eighty to eighty-eight and that era."