This week MS-DOS celebrated the 30th anniversary

The MS-DOS operating system, produced by Microsoft from the beginning of the 1980s, has been 30 years old this week. During its existence, eight large versions and approximately two dozen intermediate versions were released.

The last stable release that received the 8.0 index took place in September 2000. After that, the development of the MS-DOS OS, which provided the user with only the command line interface, was discontinued, but the development of DOS in one form or another continues to this day, Vesti.ru reports.

This platform understood only text instructions, and this system did not have such a common graphic interface today.

MS-DOS is not unique, it is only one of the members of the family of operating systems of this type. Similar products were produced by IBM (PC-DOS), Digital Research (DR DOS), etc.

In addition, MS-DOS was not a Microsoft development, RIA Novosti recalls. On July 27, 1981, the company bought a license for the 86-DOS operating system created for Intel 8086 processors from Seattle Computer Products.

This system has become MS-DOS, which was installed on IBM PC computers. Prior to this, Microsoft sold the tools for developing programs in the BASIC language-the market for their sales was not compared with the sales volume of MS-DOS.

MS-DOS became the foundation for the first versions of Windows until 3.11. Until 2000, these products were produced together, and the user could at any time switch from one OS to another, or launch an emulated copy of DOS in Windows.

This was used to perform various tasks in the field of system administration, as well as launching applications and games created for DOS. Windows Me, published in 2000, was the last Microsoft product, in which such a symbiosis was preserved.

The Freedos project is currently developing-a free version of the popular OS with open source codes, compatible with applications for MS-DOS. Manufacturers of personal computers often offer this OS instead of Windows on inexpensive systems - thus it is possible to reduce their price.

Games created in due time for DOS are somewhat popular today. These, for example, are the first versions of Warcraft, Doom and Quake. To start them, you can use an emulator that reproduces at the program level almost all the features of the chips of the 80s of the last century.