It was the year 1992, I was eight years old and had just given me a computer. Amstrad PC specifically a 5286 HD technology virtually tip for the time I had the particularity to include a hard drive and be able to read diskettes high density, accommodating up to 1.44 MB. It also meant my first contact with an operating system, to be exact MS-DOS 3.30. As they report in Computerworld soon all this will be little more than memories.
Leave this digital grandmother to finish telling his story. In those years I wanted a Amiga 1200, mainly by the video game catalog of those machines – remember that I was only 8 years old. What I can say is that the person who gave it to me someone commented with a very good opinion that the PCs and MS-DOS were the future. Needless to say, he was right.
Let me tell you that for old people who have been using computers for a long time this operating system from Microsoft was a shock. Especially because if you had informed a little you knew that other computers like Amiga or Mac had a graphical environment that made tasks much easier. When you turned on a PC that incorporated this system you would find the characters C:> and a blinking cursor.
With MS-DOS you faced the command prompt. At that time courses were taken to learn how to work with it, which forced you to memorize all kinds of instructions and taught you to move through the operating system by command. MS-DOS was celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2011.
It is possible that in your particular case you take years using Windows without thinking that the symbol of the system that can be found in it is the last bastion that has left MS-DOS, which has been jumping from one version to the other for 35 years In an uninterrupted manner. Microsoft will now remove the command prompt once and for all.
The history of MS-DOS
There was not always an MS-DOS signed by Microsoft, it was not even called that when he was born. Now that your end is coming it is worth remembering your story so that, at least for our part, do not fall into oblivion.
In 1980 the dominant operating system for PC was the Digital Research CP / M , for the z80 processor. At the same time Tim Patterson created Quick and Dirty Operating System or QDOS. It was referred to as a CP / M clone with an improved file system for the new processor that had just come up, the 8086 – although later it was shown that MS-DOS was not a copy of CP / M. At that time no one cared much.
Things changed when IBM built a PC based on 8086. For this new gadget IBM had to settle in programming languages and in an operating system. I could buy those languages from a small independent vendor called Microsoft, but where could I get the operating system?
The most obvious response, seconded by a young Bill Gates, was to go directly to the source: CP / M creator and Digital Resarch co-founder Gary Kildall. Kildall did not meet with IBM and therefore no agreement was signed.
The next thing was to ask Microsoft for help again in the search for an operating system. Paul Allen, the other co-founder of the Redmond company, knew about QDOS. Microsoft bought QDOS in 1981 for $ 50,000. Shortly after IBM made it one of the operating systems of its PCs, renamed MS-DOS.
The most interesting part of all this is that Microsoft agreed with IBM to sell MS-DOS to other manufacturers. This award was the foundation on which Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates raised an empire.
MS-DOS disappears from Insider Preview
At the end of last month the token disappeared in the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14791. Dona Sarkar, head of the Windows Insider Program, wrote the following:
PowerShell is now the default command line for File Explorer. Replaces the command prompt (also known as cmd.exe)
Build 14791 is not even in beta. They are the foundation for the Redstone 2 update, also known as Windows 10 SP2. This is the future of Windows 10, which will not include this old relic of Microsoft software .
PoweShell just turned ten, and it was always thought of as a DOS replacement . For those who do not know, we can say that it is a command line combined with a scripting language based on the .NET Framework.
This other console was added to give Windows Server more control over operating system administrators. Over time it has become a powerful management tool for both home users and servers.