DOS commonly refers to the family of closely related operating systems which dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995 (or until about 2000, if Windows versions 95 and 98 are included) : PC-DOS, MS-DOS, FreeDOS, DR-DOS, Novell-DOS, OpenDOS, PTS-DOS, ROM-DOS and several others. Of these, MS-DOS from Microsoft was the most widely used. These operating systems ran on IBM PC type hardware using the Intel x86 CPUs or their compatible cousins from other makers. MS-DOS is still common today and was the foundation for many of Microsoft's operating systems (from Windows V1.00 through Windows Me). MS-DOS was later abandoned as the foundation for their operating systems.

History

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MS-DOS (and the IBM PC-DOS which was licensed therefrom), and its predecessor, QDOS, was an imitation of CP/M (Control Program / (for) Microcomputers) — which was the dominant operating system for 8-bit Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 based microcomputers.

It was first developed at Seattle Computer Products by Tim Patterson as a variant of CP/M-80 from Digital Research, but intended as an internal product for testing SCP's new 8086 CPU card for the S-100 bus. It did not run on the 8080 (or compatible) CPU needed for CP/M-80. It was called QDOS, among several other names. Microsoft licensed it from SCP, made changes and licensed the result to IBM (sold as PC-DOS) for its new 'PC' using the 8088 CPU (internally the same as the 8086), and to many other hardware manufacturers. In the later case it was sold as MS-DOS.

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