MS-DOS: /M-S-dos/ n. [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A clone of CP/M for the 8088
crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products,
who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and is said to
have regretted it ever since. Microsoft licensed QDOS order to have something to
demo for IBM on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including
vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O redirection,
and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and subsequent versions; as a
result, there are two or more incompatible versions of many system calls, and
MS-DOS programmers can never agree on basic things like what character to use as
an option switch or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess
is now the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS, which
annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated operating systems (the
name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was attached to IBM's first disk
operating system for the 360). The name further annoys those who know what the
term operating
system does (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively
simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like "dose", as in
"I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a dose of brain-damaging drugs
(a slogan button in wide circulation among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say
No!"). See mess-dos, ill-behaved.
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