[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 in 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}.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {bomb}{CP/M}{crudware}{mess-dos}{operating system}{real operating system}{same-day service}]