MS-DOS
Command lineOperating systemComputer history
MS-DOS is what a personal computer was, before computers had windows to click on. Switch one on and you got a blinking C:\> prompt and nothing else: no mouse, no icons, no help. It ran the world's PCs through the 1980s, and it is not quite gone either. Open the Command Prompt on a Windows machine today and DIR, CD, COPY, TYPE and batch files still work, which makes MS-DOS a genuinely useful piece of history to have typed for yourself.
First released
1981
Created by
Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products; bought and sold on by Microsoft
Fun fact
It began life as QDOS: the "Quick and Dirty Operating System"
Where you'll see it
The first home and office PCsRunning early PC gamesThe ancestor of the Windows Command PromptSeeing where all of this came from