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IBM PC DOS (an acronym for IBM Personal Computer Disk Operating System), [nb 1] also known as PC DOS or IBM DOS, is a discontinued disk operating system for the IBM Personal Computer, its successors, and IBM PC compatibles. It was sold by IBM from the early 1980s into the 2000s.
Loads the rest of itself into memory. Before PC DOS 5.0 the system files still had to be stored at fixed physical positions on the disk and stored in consecutive sectors. With PC DOS 5.0 (and higher) this requirement was reduced down to the first three sectors of IBMBIO.COM only. [10] [nb 2] Loads the DOS kernel. The kernel is stored in IBMDOS.COM.
The user cannot switch between programs. The software can only exist on its own floppy disk, not stored on a disk with multiple programs, such as a hard disk drive. The self-booting game or application cannot easily use computer hardware normally accessed through device drivers in the operating system. The program needs built-in support for ...
The phrase "IBM PC compatible self-booting disk" is sometimes shortened to "PC booter". Self-booting disks were common for other computers as well. These games were distributed on 5 + 1 ⁄ 4" or, later, 3 + 1 ⁄ 2", floppy disks that booted directly, meaning once they were inserted in the drive and the computer was turned on, a minimal ...
OS/2 allows for 'DOS from Drive A:', (VMDISK). This is a real DOS, like MS-DOS 6.22 or PC DOS 5.00. One makes a bootable floppy disk of the DOS, adds a number of drivers from OS/2, and then creates a special image. The DOS booted this way has full access to the system, but provides its own drivers for hardware.
So very soon an IBM-compatible architecture became the goal, and before long all 8086-family computers closely emulated IBM hardware, and only a single version of MS-DOS for a fixed hardware platform was all that was needed for the market. This specific version of MS-DOS is the version that is discussed here, as all other versions of MS-DOS ...
IBM releases an upgraded PC with IBM PC DOS 1.1 which supports its Tandon TM100-2 320 KB (327,680 bytes) double-sided, double-density floppy disk drive. The double-sided directory increased from four to seven sectors, allowing up to 112 directory entries, leaving 630 sectors, i.e. 315 clusters (322,560 bytes) for data (cluster size doubled to ...
Support for partitioned media, and thereby the master boot record (MBR), was introduced with IBM PC DOS 2.0 in March 1983 in order to support the 10 MB hard disk of the then-new IBM Personal Computer XT, still using the FAT12 file system. The original version of the MBR was written by David Litton of IBM in June 1982.