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76-429: The backbone of office automation is a local area network , which allows users to transfer data, mail and voice across the network. All office functions, including dictation, typing , filing, copying, fax , telex , microfilm and records management, telephone and telephone switchboard operations, fall into this category. Office automation was a popular term in the 1970s and 1980s as the desktop computer exploded onto

152-445: A hotspot service. Network topology describes the layout of interconnections between devices and network segments. At the data link layer and physical layer , a wide variety of LAN topologies have been used, including ring , bus , mesh and star . Simple LANs generally consist of cabling and one or more switches . A switch can be connected to a router , cable modem , or ADSL modem for Internet access. A LAN can include

228-462: A wide area network (WAN). DOS DOS ( / d ɒ s / , / d ɔː s / ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and a rebranded version, Microsoft 's MS-DOS , both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible systems from other manufacturers include DR-DOS (1988), ROM-DOS (1989), PTS-DOS (1993), and FreeDOS (1998). MS-DOS dominated

304-495: A 64 KiB page frame in the reserved upper memory area. 80386 and later systems could use a virtual 8086 mode (V86) mode memory manager like EMM386 to create expanded memory from extended memory without the need of an add-on card. The second specification was the Extended Memory Specification (XMS) for 80286 and later systems. This provided a way to copy data to and from extended memory, access to

380-401: A batch file is interpreted as a program to run. Batch files can also make use of internal commands, such as GOTO and conditional statements . The operating system offers an application programming interface that allows development of character-based applications, but not for accessing most of the hardware , such as graphics cards , printers , or mice . This required programmers to access

456-498: A configuration file similar to CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. If the MSDOS.SYS BootGUI directive is set to 0 , the boot process will stop with the command processor (typically COMMAND.COM) loaded, instead of executing WIN.COM automatically. DOS uses a filesystem which supports 8.3 filenames : 8 characters for the filename and 3 characters for the extension. Starting with DOS 2 hierarchical directories are supported. Each directory name

532-425: A conversation with fellow United Way National Board Executive Committee member Mary Maxwell Gates , who referred Opel to her son Bill Gates for help with an 8088-compatible build of CP/M. IBM was then sent to Digital Research, and a meeting was set up. However, initial negotiations for the use of CP/M broke down: Digital Research wished to sell CP/M on a royalty basis, while IBM sought a single license, and to change

608-524: A few developers and computer engineers still use it because it is close to the hardware. DOS's structure of accessing hardware directly allows it to be used in embedded devices . The final versions of DR-DOS are still aimed at this market. ROM-DOS is used as operating system for the Canon PowerShot Pro 70. On Linux , it is possible to run DOSEMU , a Linux-native virtual machine for running DOS programs at near native speed. There are

684-483: A file name with a space, has sometimes been used by viruses or hacking programs to obscure files from users who do not know how to access these locations. DOS was designed for the Intel 8088 processor, which can only directly access a maximum of 1 MiB of RAM. Both IBM and Microsoft chose 640 kibibytes (KiB) as the maximum amount of memory available to programs and reserved the remaining 384 KiB for video memory,

760-470: A larger geographic distance, but also generally involves leased telecommunication circuits . Ethernet and Wi-Fi are the two most common technologies in use for local area networks. Historical network technologies include ARCNET , Token Ring and AppleTalk . The increasing demand and usage of computers in universities and research labs in the late 1960s generated the need to provide high-speed interconnections between computer systems. A 1970 report from

836-521: A manifesto proposing the development of an open-source replacement. Within a few weeks, other programmers including Pat Villani and Tim Norman joined the project. A kernel, the COMMAND.COM command line interpreter (shell), and core utilities were created by pooling code they had written or found available. There were several official pre-release distributions of FreeDOS before the FreeDOS 1.0 distribution

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912-666: A more user-friendly environment, numerous software manufacturers wrote file management programs that provided users with WIMP interfaces. Microsoft Windows is a notable example, eventually resulting in Microsoft Windows 9x becoming a self-contained program loader, and replacing DOS as the most-used PC-compatible program loader. Text user interface programs included Norton Commander , DOS Navigator , Volkov Commander , Quarterdesk DESQview , and Sidekick . Graphical user interface programs included Digital Research's GEM (originally written for CP/M) and GEOS . Eventually,

988-489: A much more sophisticated operating system than most of its competitors. Of the competitors to NetWare, only Banyan Vines had comparable technical strengths, but Banyan never gained a secure base. 3Com produced 3+Share and Microsoft produced MS-Net . These then formed the basis for collaboration between Microsoft and 3Com to create a simple network operating system LAN Manager and its cousin, IBM's LAN Server . None of these enjoyed any lasting success; Netware dominated

1064-513: A number of other emulators for running DOS on various versions of Unix and Microsoft Windows such as DOSBox . DOSBox is designed for legacy gaming (e.g. King's Quest , Doom ) on modern operating systems. DOSBox includes its own implementation of DOS which is strongly tied to the emulator and cannot run on real hardware, but can also boot MS-DOS, FreeDOS, or other DOS operating systems if needed. MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS related operating systems are commonly associated with machines using

1140-413: A program run from one floppy while accessing its data on another. Hard drives were originally assigned the letters "C" and "D". DOS could only support one active partition per drive. As support for more hard drives became available, this developed into first assigning a drive letter to each drive's active primary partition , then making a second pass over the drives to allocate letters to logical drives in

1216-501: A retail version of MS-DOS, starting with MS-DOS 5.0. In the mid-1980s, Microsoft developed a multitasking version of DOS . This version of DOS is generally referred to as "European MS-DOS 4" because it was developed for ICL and licensed to several European companies. This version of DOS supports preemptive multitasking, shared memory, device helper services and New Executable ("NE") format executables. None of these features were used in later versions of DOS, but they were used to form

1292-566: A series of disagreements over two successor operating systems to DOS, OS/2 and Windows. They split development of their DOS systems as a result. The last retail version of MS-DOS was MS-DOS 6.22; after this, MS-DOS became part of Windows 95, 98 and Me. The last retail version of PC DOS was PC DOS 2000 (also called PC DOS 7 revision 1), though IBM did later develop PC DOS 7.10 for OEMs and internal use. The FreeDOS project began on 26 June 1994, when Microsoft announced it would no longer sell or support MS-DOS. Jim Hall then posted

1368-415: A time can use them, and DOS itself has no functionality to allow more than one program to execute at a time. The DOS kernel provides various functions for programs (an application program interface ), like character I/O, file management, memory management, program loading and termination. DOS provides the ability for shell scripting via batch files (with the filename extension .BAT ). Each line of

1444-495: A wide variety of other network devices such as firewalls , load balancers , and network intrusion detection . Advanced LANs are characterized by their use of redundant links with switches using the spanning tree protocol to prevent loops, their ability to manage differing traffic types via quality of service (QoS), and their ability to segregate traffic with VLANs . At the higher network layers, protocols such as NetBIOS , IPX/SPX , AppleTalk and others were once common, but

1520-572: A year Microsoft licensed MS-DOS to over 70 other companies, which supplied the operating system for their own hardware, sometimes under their own names. Microsoft later required the use of the MS-DOS name, with the exception of the IBM variant. IBM continued to develop their version, PC DOS , for the IBM PC. Digital Research became aware that an operating system similar to CP/M was being sold by IBM (under

1596-539: Is a real DOS, like MS-DOS 6.22 or PC DOS 5.00. One makes a bootable floppy disk of the DOS, adds a number of drivers from OS/2, and then creates a special image. The DOS booted this way has full access to the system, but provides its own drivers for hardware. One can use such a disk to access cdrom drives for which there is no OS/2 driver. In all 32-bit (IA-32) editions of the Windows NT family since 1993, DOS emulation

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1672-714: Is also 8.3 format but the maximum directory path length is 64 characters due to the internal current directory structure (CDS) tables that DOS maintains. Including the drive name, the maximum length of a fully qualified filename that DOS supports is 80 characters using the format drive:\path\filename.ext followed by a null byte. DOS uses the File Allocation Table (FAT) filesystem. This was originally FAT12 which supported up to 4078 clusters per drive. DOS 3.0 added support for FAT16 which used 16-bit allocation entries and supported up to 65518 clusters per drive. Compaq MS-DOS 3.31 added support for FAT16B which removed

1748-431: Is an optional built-in driver for a fourth line printer supported in some versions of DR-DOS since 7.02. CONFIG$ constitutes the real mode PnP manager in MS-DOS 7.0–8.0. AUX typically defaults to COM1 , and PRN to LPT1 ( LST ), but these defaults can be changed in some versions of DOS to point to other serial or parallel devices. The PLT device (present only in some HP OEM versions of MS-DOS)

1824-531: Is available in COMMAND.COM. Programs like the Microsoft CD-ROM Extensions (MSCDEX) provide access to files on CD-ROM disks. Some TSRs can even perform a rudimentary form of task switching. For example, the shareware program Back and Forth (1990) has a hotkey to save the state of the currently-running program to disk, load another program, and switch to it, making it possible to switch "back and forth" between programs (albeit slowly, due to

1900-408: Is based upon DOS 5. Although there is a default configuration (config.sys and autoexec.bat), one can use alternate files on a session-by-session basis. It is possible to load drivers in these files to access the host system, although these are typically third-party. Under OS/2 2.x and later, the DOS emulation is provided by DOSKRNL. This is a file that represents the combined IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM,

1976-502: Is invalid." These names (except for NUL) have continued to be supported in all versions of MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS ever since. LST was also available in some OEM versions of MS-DOS 1.25, whereas other OEM versions of MS-DOS 1.25 already used LPT1 (first line printer ) and COM1 (first serial communication device ) instead, as introduced with PC DOS. In addition to LPT1 and LPT2 as well as COM1 to COM3 , Hewlett-Packard's OEM version of MS-DOS 2.11 for

2052-413: Is likely to render the media unbootable. It is, however, possible to replace the shell at will, a method that can be used to start the execution of dedicated applications faster. This limitation does not apply to any version of DR DOS, where the system files can be located anywhere in the root directory and do not need to be contiguous. Therefore, system files can be simply copied to a disk provided that

2128-504: Is provided by way of a virtual DOS machine (NTVDM). 64-bit (IA-64 and x86-64) versions of Windows do not support NTVDM and cannot run 16-bit DOS applications directly; third-party emulators such as DOSbox can be used to run DOS programs on those machines. DOS systems use a command-line interface . A program is started by entering its filename at the command prompt. DOS systems include utility programs and provide internal commands that do not correspond to programs. In an attempt to provide

2204-540: Is still the basis of most commercial LANs today. While optical fiber cable is common for links between network switches , use of fiber to the desktop is rare. In a wireless LAN , users have unrestricted movement within the coverage area. Wireless networks have become popular in residences and small businesses, because of their ease of installation. Most wireless LANs use Wi-Fi as wireless adapters are typically integrated into smartphones , tablet computers and laptops . Guests are often offered Internet access via

2280-470: The CP/M operating system in the late 1970s, and later DOS -based systems starting in 1981, meant that many sites grew to dozens or even hundreds of computers. The initial driving force for networking was to share storage and printers , both of which were expensive at the time. There was much enthusiasm for the concept, and for several years, from about 1983 onward, computer industry pundits habitually declared

2356-698: The HP Portable Plus also supported LST as alias for LPT2 and 82164A as alias for COM2 ; it also supported PLT for plotters . Otherwise, COM2 , LPT2 , LPT3 and the CLOCK$ (still named CLOCK in some issues of MS-DOS 2.11 ) clock device were introduced with DOS 2.0, and COM3 and COM4 were added with DOS 3.3. Only the multitasking MS-DOS 4 supported KEYBD$ and SCREEN$ . DR DOS 5.0 and higher and Multiuser DOS support an $ IDLE$ device for dynamic idle detection to saving power and improve multitasking. LPT4

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2432-640: The Intel x86 or compatible CPUs , mainly IBM PC compatibles . Machine-dependent versions of MS-DOS were produced for many non-IBM-compatible x86 -based machines, with variations from relabelling of the Microsoft distribution under the manufacturer's name, to versions specifically designed to work with non-IBM-PC-compatible hardware. As long as application programs used DOS APIs instead of direct hardware access, they could run on both IBM-PC-compatible and incompatible machines. The original FreeDOS kernel, DOS-C ,

2508-459: The Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) has prevailed as the standard of choice. LANs can maintain connections with other LANs via leased lines, leased services, or across the Internet using virtual private network technologies. Depending on how the connections are established and secured, and the distance involved, such linked LANs may also be classified as a metropolitan area network (MAN) or

2584-533: The Lawrence Radiation Laboratory detailing the growth of their "Octopus" network gave a good indication of the situation. A number of experimental and early commercial LAN technologies were developed in the 1970s. Ethernet was developed at Xerox PARC between 1973 and 1974. Cambridge Ring was developed at Cambridge University starting in 1974. ARCNET was developed by Datapoint Corporation in 1976 and announced in 1977. It had

2660-490: The extended partition , then a third pass to give any other non-active primary partitions their names (where such additional partitions existed and contained a DOS-supported file system). Lastly, DOS allocates letters for optical disc drives , RAM disks , and other hardware. Letter assignments usually occur in the order the drivers are loaded, but the drivers can instruct DOS to assign a different letter; drivers for network drives, for example, typically assign letters nearer to

2736-521: The read-only memory of adapters on some video and network peripherals, and the system's BIOS. By 1985, some DOS applications were already hitting the memory limit, while much of reserved was unused, depending on the machine's specifications. Specifications were developed to allow access to additional memory. The first was the Expanded Memory Specification (EMS) was designed to allow memory on an add-on card to be accessed via

2812-466: The 1980s, several token ring network implementations for LANs were developed. IBM released their own implementation of token ring in 1985, It ran at 4  Mbit/s . IBM claimed that their token ring systems were superior to Ethernet, especially under load, but these claims were debated. IBM's implementation of token ring was the basis of the IEEE 802.5 standard. A 16 Mbit/s version of Token Ring

2888-494: The 32‑ MiB drive limit and could support up to 512 MiB. Finally MS-DOS 7.1 (the DOS component of Windows 9x) added support for FAT32 which used 32-bit allocation entries and could support hard drives up to 137 GiB and beyond. Starting with DOS 3.1, file redirector support was added to DOS. This was initially used to support networking but was later used to support CD-ROM drives with MSCDEX . IBM PC DOS 4.0 also had preliminary installable file system (IFS) support but this

2964-584: The 65,520-byte high memory area directly above the first megabyte of memory and the upper memory block area. Generally XMS support was provided by HIMEM.SYS or a V86 mode memory manager like QEMM or 386MAX which also supported EMS. Starting with DOS 5, DOS could directly take advantage of the HMA by loading its kernel code and disk buffers there via the DOS=HIGH statement in CONFIG.SYS. DOS 5+ also allowed

3040-605: The DOS virtual machine is provided by WINOLDAP. WinOldAp creates a virtual machine based on the program's PIF file, and the system state when Windows was loaded. The DOS graphics mode, both character and graphic, can be captured and run in the window. DOS applications can use the Windows clipboard by accessing extra published calls in WinOldAp, and one can paste text through the WinOldAp graphics. The emulated DOS in OS/2 and Windows NT

3116-494: The IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995. Although the name has come to be identified specifically with this particular family of operating systems, DOS is a platform-independent acronym for disk operating system , whose use predates the IBM PC. Dozens of other operating systems also use the acronym, beginning with the mainframe DOS/360 from 1966. Others include Apple DOS , Apple ProDOS , Atari DOS , Commodore DOS , TRSDOS , and AmigaDOS . IBM PC DOS (and

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3192-540: The basis of the OS/2 1.0 kernel. This version of DOS is distinct from the widely released PC DOS 4.0 which was developed by IBM and based upon DOS 3.3. Digital Research attempted to regain the market lost from CP/M-86, initially with Concurrent DOS , FlexOS and DOS Plus (both compatible with both MS-DOS and CP/M-86 software), later with Multiuser DOS (compatible with both MS-DOS and CP/M-86 software) and DR DOS (compatible with MS-DOS software). Digital Research

3268-623: The benches of the European Parliament Hemicycles in Strasbourg and Luxembourg. Early Ethernet ( 10BASE-5 and 10BASE-2 ) used coaxial cable . Shielded twisted pair was used in IBM's Token Ring LAN implementation. In 1984, StarLAN showed the potential of simple unshielded twisted pair by using category 3 cable —the same cable used for telephone systems. This led to the development of 10BASE-T (and its twisted-pair successors ) and structured cabling which

3344-411: The boot sector is DR DOS compatible already. In PC DOS and DR DOS 5.0 and above, the DOS system files are named IBMBIO.COM instead of IO.SYS and IBMDOS.COM instead of MSDOS.SYS . Older versions of DR DOS used DRBIOS.SYS and DRBDOS.SYS instead. Starting with MS-DOS 7.0 the binary system files IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS were combined into a single file IO.SYS whilst MSDOS.SYS became

3420-533: The coming year to be, "The year of the LAN". In practice, the concept was marred by the proliferation of incompatible physical layer and network protocol implementations, and a plethora of methods of sharing resources. Typically, each vendor would have its own type of network card, cabling, protocol, and network operating system . A solution appeared with the advent of Novell NetWare which provided even-handed support for dozens of competing card and cable types, and

3496-404: The corresponding load drive whenever an application starts. There are reserved device names in DOS that cannot be used as filenames regardless of extension as they are occupied by built-in character devices. These restrictions also affect several Windows versions, in some cases causing crashes and security vulnerabilities. The reserved names are: In Windows 95 and Windows 98 , typing in

3572-499: The default OS kernel , though the MS-DOS component remained for compatibility. With Windows 95 and 98, but not ME, the MS-DOS component could be run without starting Windows. With DOS no longer required to use Windows, the majority of users stopped using it directly. As of 2024 , available compatible systems are FreeDOS , ROM-DOS , PTS-DOS , RxDOS and REAL/32 . Some computer manufacturers, including Dell and HP , sell computers with FreeDOS as an OEM operating system. And

3648-464: The end of the alphabet. Because DOS applications use these drive letters directly (unlike the /dev directory in Unix-like systems), they can be disrupted by adding new hardware that needs a drive letter. An example is the addition of a new hard drive having a primary partition where a pre-existing hard drive contains logical drives in extended partitions; the new drive will be assigned a letter that

3724-543: The feasibility of employing TCP/IP LANs to interconnect Worldwide Military Command and Control System (WWMCCS) computers at command centers throughout the United States. However, WWMCCS was superseded by the Global Command and Control System (GCCS) before that could happen. During the same period, Unix workstations were using TCP/IP networking. Although the workstation market segment is now much reduced,

3800-681: The first commercial installation in December 1977 at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York. In 1979, the Electronic voting systems for the European Parliament was the first installation of a LAN connecting hundreds (420) of microprocessor-controlled voting terminals to a polling/selecting central unit with a multidrop bus with Master/slave (technology) arbitration. The development and proliferation of personal computers using

3876-400: The hardware directly, usually resulting in each application having its own set of device drivers for each hardware peripheral. Hardware manufacturers would release specifications to ensure device drivers for popular applications were available. The DOS system files loaded by the boot sector must be contiguous and be the first two directory entries . As such, removing and adding this file

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3952-580: The introduction of Xenix . The company planned to improve MS-DOS over time, so it would be almost indistinguishable from single-user Xenix, or XEDOS , which would also run on the Motorola 68000 , Zilog Z-8000 , and LSI-11 ; they would be upwardly compatible with Xenix, which BYTE in 1983 described as "the multi-user MS-DOS of the future". IBM, however, did not want to replace DOS. After AT&T began selling Unix, Microsoft and IBM began developing OS/2 as an alternative. The two companies later had

4028-458: The location of the reserved name (such as CON/CON, AUX/AUX, or PRN/PRN) crashes the operating system, of which Microsoft has provided a security fix for the issue. In Windows XP , the name of the file or folder using a reserved name silently reverts to its previous name, with no notification or error message. In Windows Vista and later, attempting to use a reserved name for a file or folder brings up an error message saying "The specified device name

4104-415: The manual process, and most employees who participate in direct deposit often find their paychecks come earlier than if they'd have to wait for their checks to be written and then cleared by the bank. Other ways automation has reduced employee manpower on tasks is automated voice direction. Through the use of prompts, automated phone menus and directed calls, the need for employees to be dedicated to answer

4180-399: The manufacturers of major DOS systems began to include their own environment managers. MS-DOS/IBM DOS 4 included DOS Shell ; DR DOS 5.0, released the following year, included ViewMAX , based upon GEM. Although DOS is not a multitasking operating system, it does provide a terminate-and-stay-resident (TSR) function which allows programs to remain resident in memory. These programs can hook

4256-672: The name to "PC DOS". Digital Research founder Gary Kildall refused, and IBM withdrew. IBM again approached Bill Gates. Gates in turn approached Seattle Computer Products . There, programmer Tim Paterson had developed a variant of CP/M-80 , intended as an internal product for testing SCP's new 16-bit Intel 8086 CPU card for the S-100 bus . The system was initially named QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), before being made commercially available as 86-DOS . Microsoft purchased 86-DOS, allegedly for US$ 50,000. This became Microsoft Disk Operating System, MS-DOS, introduced in 1981. Within

4332-444: The personal computer LAN business from early after its introduction in 1983 until the mid-1990s when Microsoft introduced Windows NT . In 1983, TCP/IP was first shown capable of supporting actual defense department applications on a Defense Communication Agency LAN testbed located at Reston, Virginia. The TCP/IP-based LAN successfully supported Telnet , FTP , and a Defense Department teleconferencing application. This demonstrated

4408-429: The phones has been reduced, and in some cases, eliminated. This business software article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Local area network A local area network ( LAN ) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers

4484-470: The retail setting, automation also increases choice. Customers can easily process their payments through automated credit card machines and no longer have to wait in line for an employee to process and manually type in the credit card numbers. Office payrolls have been automated, which means no one has to manually cut checks, and those checks that are cut can be printed through computer programs. Direct deposit can be automatically set up and this further reduces

4560-501: The same name that IBM insisted upon for CP/M), and threatened legal action. IBM responded by offering an agreement: they would give PC consumers a choice of PC DOS or CP/M-86 , Kildall's 8086 version. Side-by-side, CP/M cost US$ 200 more than PC DOS, and sales were low. CP/M faded, with MS-DOS and PC DOS becoming the marketed operating system for PCs and PC compatibles. Microsoft originally sold MS-DOS only to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). One major reason for this

4636-478: The scene. Advantages of office automation include that it can get many tasks accomplished faster, it eliminates the need for a large staff, less storage is required to store data, and multiple people can update data simultaneously in the event of changes in schedule. Businesses can easily purchase and stock their wares with the aid of technology. Many of the manual tasks that used to be done by hand can now be done through hand held devices and UPC and SKU coding. In

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4712-505: The separately sold MS-DOS ) and its predecessor, 86-DOS , ran on Intel 8086 16-bit processors. It was developed to be similar to Digital Research 's CP/M —the dominant disk operating system for 8-bit Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 microcomputers—in order to simplify porting CP/M applications to MS-DOS. When IBM introduced the IBM PC , built with the Intel 8088 microprocessor, they needed an operating system. Chairman John Opel had

4788-506: The system calls are passed through to the OS/2 windowing services. DOS programs run in their own environment, the bulk of the DOS utilities are provided by bound DOS / OS2 applications in the \OS2 directory. OS/2 can run Windows 3.1 applications by using a modified copy of Windows (Win-OS/2). The modifications allow Windows 3.1 programs to run seamlessly on the OS/2 desktop, or one can start a WinOS/2 desktop, similar to starting Windows from DOS. OS/2 allows for 'DOS from Drive A:', (VMDISK). This

4864-606: The system timer or keyboard interrupts to allow themselves to run tasks in the background or to be invoked at any time, preempting the current running program and effectively implementing a simple form of multitasking on a program-specific basis. The DOS PRINT command does this to implement background print spooling. Borland Sidekick , a popup personal information manager (PIM), also uses this technique. Terminate-and-stay-resident programs are also used to provide additional features not available by default. Programs like CED and DOSKEY provide command-line editing facilities beyond what

4940-608: The technologies developed in the area continue to be influential on the Internet and in all forms of networking—and the TCP/IP protocol has replaced IPX , AppleTalk , NBF , and other protocols used by the early PC LANs. Econet was Acorn Computers's low-cost local area network system, intended for use by schools and small businesses. It was first developed for the Acorn Atom and Acorn System 2 / 3 / 4 computers in 1981. In

5016-690: The use of available upper memory blocks via the DOS=UMB statement in CONFIG.SYS. The DOS emulation in OS/2 and Windows runs in much the same way as native applications do. They can access all of the drives and services, and can even use the host's clipboard services. Because the drivers for file systems and such forth reside in the host system, the DOS emulation needs only provide a DOS API translation layer which converts DOS calls to OS/2 or Windows system calls. The translation layer generally also converts BIOS calls and virtualizes common I/O port accesses which many DOS programs commonly use. In Windows 3.1 and 9x,

5092-417: The user changes them. Under DOS, this problem can be worked around by defining a SUBST drive and installing the DOS program into this logical drive. The assignment of this drive would then be changed in a batch job whenever the application starts. Under some versions of Concurrent DOS , as well as under Multiuser DOS , System Manager and REAL/32 , the reserved drive letter L: will automatically be assigned to

5168-522: Was a relatively high-speed choice of that era, with speeds such as 100 Mbit/s. By 1994, vendors included Cisco Systems , National Semiconductor , Network Peripherals, SysKonnect (acquired by Marvell Technology Group ), and 3Com . FDDI installations have largely been replaced by Ethernet deployments. In 1979, the Electronic voting systems for the European Parliament was using 10 kilometers of simple unshielded twisted pair category 3 cable —the same cable used for telephone systems—installed inside

5244-416: Was bought by Novell , and DR DOS became PalmDOS and Novell DOS ; later, it was part of Caldera (under the names OpenDOS and DR-DOS 7.02 / 7.03 ), Lineo , and DeviceLogics . Gordon Letwin wrote in 1995 that "DOS was, when we first wrote it, a one-time throw-away product intended to keep IBM happy so that they'd buy our languages." Microsoft expected that it would be an interim solution before

5320-513: Was derived from DOS/NT for the Motorola 68000 series of CPUs in the early 1990s. While these systems loosely resembled the DOS architecture, applications were not binary compatible due to the incompatible instruction sets of these non-x86-CPUs. However, applications written in high-level languages could be ported easily. DOS is a single-user, single-tasking operating system with basic kernel functions that are non-reentrant : only one program at

5396-464: Was previously assigned to one of the extended partition logical drives. Moreover, even adding a new hard drive having only logical drives in an extended partition would still disrupt the letters of RAM disks and optical drives. This problem persisted through Microsoft's DOS-based 9x versions of Windows until they were replaced by versions based on the NT line, which preserves the letters of existing drives until

5472-467: Was reconfigurable as well. Filenames ended with a colon ( : ) such as NUL: conventionally indicate device names, but the colon is not actually a part of the name of the built-in device drivers. Colons are not necessary to be typed in some cases, for example: It is still possible to create files or directories using these reserved device names, such as through direct editing of directory data structures in disk sectors. Such naming, such as starting

5548-543: Was released on 3 September 2006. Made available under the GNU General Public License (GPL), FreeDOS does not require license fees or royalties. Early versions of Microsoft Windows ran on MS-DOS. By the early 1990s, the Windows graphical shell saw heavy use on new DOS systems. In 1995, Windows 95 was bundled as a standalone operating system that did not require a separate DOS license. Windows 95 (and Windows 98 and ME, that followed it) took over as

5624-491: Was standardized by the 802.5 working group in 1989. IBM had market dominance over Token Ring, for example, in 1990, IBM equipment was the most widely used for Token Ring networks. Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), a LAN standard, was considered an attractive campus backbone network technology in the early to mid 1990s since existing Ethernet networks only offered 10 Mbit/s data rates and Token Ring networks only offered 4 Mbit/s or 16 Mbit/s rates. Thus it

5700-415: Was that not all early PCs were 100% IBM PC compatible . DOS was structured such that there was a separation between the system specific device driver code ( IO.SYS ) and the DOS kernel ( MSDOS.SYS ). Microsoft provided an OEM Adaptation Kit (OAK) which allowed OEMs to customize the device driver code to their particular system. By the early 1990s, most PCs adhered to IBM PC standards so Microsoft began selling

5776-518: Was unused and removed in DOS 5.0. DOS also supported Block Devices ("Disk Drive" devices) loaded from CONFIG.SYS that could be used under the DOS file system to support network devices. In DOS, drives are referred to by identifying letters. Standard practice is to reserve "A" and "B" for floppy drives . On systems with only one floppy drive DOS assigns both letters to the drive, prompting the user to swap disks as programs alternate access between them. This facilitates copying from floppy to floppy or having

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