As the forerunner to the graphical user interfaces in Microsoft’s Windows platform, MS-DOS helped set the stage for the company’s dominance in the PC software market. When MS-DOS was released in 1981, ...

Earlier this month, I spent a day working in the throwback world of DOS. More specifically, it was FreeDOS version 1.1, the open source version of the long-defunct Microsoft MS-DOS operating system.

FreeDOS is an open source operating system that allows you to run MS-DOS applications even though Microsoft stopped developing and supporting MS-DOS more than two decades ago. While FreeDOS has been ...

Right now, as I sit here typing these words, it is February of the year 2017. The words of which I speak? They are entirely about DOS. Yes—that DOS. The one that powered so many computers throughout ...

On this day in 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded a company called Micro-Soft in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The two men had worked together before, as members of the Lakeside Programming group in ...

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 ...

Editor’s note: After this article was published, Microsoft issued a statement clarifying that cmd.exe will not be going away after all. Read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ follow-up column. My very first ...