Ten Momentous Moments in DOS History

In 2002,a startup bought DR-DOSto market it as a lightweight operating system for embedded applications; itcontinues to market it. DR-DOS, in other words, has remained a viable business proposition longer than MS-DOS. That may not qualify as getting the last laugh, but it's something.

In the 1980s, there were no such things as smartphones--hey, it was an era when even laptops were somewhat exotic. But folks still saw potential in the idea of cramming the DOS-based PC down into a form factor that was petite enough to fit in a pocket, or at least come close. In 1989, Atari released the $400Portfolioand a startup calledPoqetunveiled the $2000 Poqet PC. Both resembled shrunken notebooks, with tiny monochrome screens and QWERTY keyboards. And both ran versions of DOS--DIP DOS 2.11 in the case of the Portfolio, and MS-DOS 3.3 with the Poqet.

In 1991, these DOS dwarfs were joined by HP's $69995LX, a more truly pocketable device that packed not only DOS but Lotus 1-2-3 and other desktop applications. The era of the DOS-based palmtop didn't survive the mid-1990s, but all these machines retain cult followings today.

In 2008, you can buy a 750GB hard disk for a couple of hundred bucks, giving you plenty of storage elbow room for a reasonable price. In the early 1990s, however, hard disks were much, much tinier and much, much pricier. (In 1993, a 250MB drive--that's 1/3000th of 750GB--set you back around $500). So Stac Electronics'Stackerand similar compression utilities appeared, cramming about twice as much data onto a drive by compressing it on the fly. In retrospect, they brought major downsides with them--data recovery became far tougher when your entire disk was compressed--but they were huge hits at the time.

In response, Digital Research began bundling a compression utility called SuperStor with DR-DOS 6.0 in 1991. In response to that, Microsoft added a compression feature called DoubleSpace to MS-DOS 6.0 in 1993. And that caused Stac to sue Microsoft, since the companies had been in talks involving Microsoft licensing the Stacker technology. Microsoft pulled DoubleSpace in MS-DOS 6.1, then added a version called DriveSpace that worked around Stac's patents to MS-DOS 6.22.

The last full-blown version of DriveSpace shipped with Windows 98. Almost nobody cared, since hard-disk space was no longer the precious commodity it had once been.

In 1994, Microsoft released MS-DOS 6.22. By then, mostserious PC users were running Windows 3.1, so DOS was already most important as a piece of middleware between the computer and Windows. In 1995, Windows 95 would eliminate then need for a separate copy of of DOS, although it did that mostly by incorporating a DOS (version 7.0) into the Windows package itself. Only when Windows XP shipped in 2001 did the bulk of consumers get a version of Windows that didn't have DOS at its heart.

Once MS-DOS reached 6.22, it was as good as it was going to get--Microsoft stopped improving it but continued selling it. IBM, meanwhile, eventually released an upgrade called PC-DOS 2000, but it sounded more exciting than it was: It was mostly the archaic PC-DOS 7.0 with some fixes to make it Y2K compliant.On November 1st, 2001, Microsoft officially stopped selling MS-DOS, and the DOS era officially ended.

But only in theory. DOS remains so basically useful that it refuses to die. For one thing, an unknown--but hardly infinitesimal--number of companies such as drycleaners and car repair outfits still run their businesses on ancient DOS applications. Maybe they understand something that most of us don't.

IBM's PC-DOS is slightly less deceased than MS-DOS, if being able tobuy it on Amazoncounts for anything.   And other DOS variants are alive and kicking, period. DR-DOS (which has gone back to that name) is beingsold as an operating system for embedded applications;FreeDOS, an open-source, DOS-compatible operating system, has inspired a thriving community. Even Dell willsell you a new Inspiron dual-core desktop running FreeDOS.

In short, you can't keep a good DOS down. VisitSaveDOS.comfor more of our DOS coverage--or head straight to theSaveDOS communityto share your thoughts about this operating system's past, present, and future.