With its recent switch to a different kernel, SvarDOS moves from being a distro of FreeDOS to greater independence.… Until ...

In the annals of PC history, IBM’s OS/2 represents a road not taken. Developed in the waning days of IBM’s partnership with Microsoft—the same partnership that had given us a decade or so of MS-DOS ...

The Mach 20 also wasn't particularly popular, but it was apparently popular enough for Microsoft to decide it warranted a ...

In context: Back in 1980, Tim Paterson was creating a new operating system he called QDOS or Quick and Dirty Operating System. The system was later renamed 86-DOS, as it was being designed to run on ...

Like the old-fangled BIOS (which is slowly being phased out with the help of EFI), the DOS operating system is a piece of computing history that refuses to be only history. While most folks will never ...

Without Microsoft, the world of modern computer technology would not be the same as we know it. Next year, Microsoft turns 50 years old, so it’s worth looking back at the megacorporation’s significant ...

Update, July 5, 2021: It's the July 4 holiday weekend in the US, which means Ars staff gets a well-deserved holiday to catch up on this summer's Steam sale (or maybe just to rest). As such, we're ...

A command-line interface is a terminal-style screen where you type commands at a prompt, one line at a time. You might associate it with the MS-DOS operating system that was widely used until the ...

It's no joke. Microsoft and IBM have joined forces to open-source the 1988 operating system MS-DOS 4.0 under the MIT License. Why? Well, why not? That got Hanselman and Wilcox digging into the ...