Timeline – Microsoft DOS
I’ll add later some information about DOS in common and about Dr. DOS which had his origins in CP/M.
I gonna mention it also here if those pages are ready.
MS-DOS 1.0/1.1
The original version of MS-DOS. This was a renamed version of QDOS which had been purchased by an upstart company called Microsoft.
MS-DOS 1.25
MS-DOS 1.25 added support for double-sided disks. Previously the disk had to be turned over to use the other side.
MS-DOS 2.0
MS-DOS 2.0 added support for IBM’s 10 MB hard disk, directories and double-density 5.25″ floppy disks with capacities of 360 KB
MS-DOS 2.11
Support for foreign and extended characters was added.
MS-DOS 3.0
Support for high-density (1.2 MB) floppy disks and 32 MB hard disks was added.
MS-DOS 3.1
This version now supported network and memory above 640 kB !!!
MS-DOS 3.2
3,5 inch 720 KB floppy support was introduced.
MS-DOS 3.3
This release was written to take advantage of IBM’s PS/2 computer range. It added support for high density 3.5″ floppy disks, more than one partition on hard disks (allowing use of disks bigger than 32 MB) and code pages.
MS-DOS 4.0
This version provided XMS support, support for partitions on hard disks up to 2 GB and a graphical shell. It also contained a large number of bugs and many programs refused to run on it. Very soon version 4.01 was released with bug fixes.
MS-DOS 5.0
This was a major upgrade. It allowed parts of DOS to load itself in the high memory area and certain device drivers and TSRs to run in the unused parts of the upper memory area between 640K and 1024K. This version also added support for IBM’s new 2.88 MB floppy disks. An improved BASIC interpreter and text editor were included,.. weiter lesen...
MS-DOS 6.0
This was a catch-up with Novell’s DR-DOS 6. It added a disk-compression utility called DoubleSpace, a basic anti-virus program and a disk defragmenter. It also finally included a MOVE command, an improved backup program, MSBACKUP and multiple boot configurations. Memory management was also improved by the addition of MEMMAKER. A number of older utilities, such as JOIN and RECOVER were.. weiter lesen...
MS-DOS 6.2x
Extra security was built into DoubleSpace following complaints of data loss. A new disk checker, SCANDISK, was also introduced, as well as improvements to DISKCOPY and SmartDrive.
MS-DOS 7.x & 8.x
These versions are versions which were shipped with Windows. Version 7.0 was shipped with Windows 95 and supported only 2GB HDD (FAT 16) only the Windows 95 version B supported FAT 32 and HDD above 2GB (DOS 7.1). DOS 8.0 is shipped with Windows ME – the last Windows version which needed DOS as basic OS.
