Talk:Disk operating system

DOS component separate in early days of computing?
The article now says "In the early days of computing, hard drive space was often limited, so the disk operating system was an extension of the operating system. This component was only loaded if it was needed. Otherwise, disk-access would be limited to low-level operations such as reading and writing disks at the sector-level." Is that referring to the "early days of computing" in the sense of the 1950's and early-to-mid 1960's, or to the "early days of computing" in the sense of the early days of microcomputing? DOS/360 was a full OS, not an extension to a base OS, loaded only when needed. Guy Harris 20:50, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
 * This refers to the early days of microcomputing (home computers). I have changed computing to microcomputing in the paragraph you quoted. I have also made more of a distinction between operating-system components called "disk operating systems" and operating systems called "Disk Operating System" (eg. DOS/360). Ae-a 15:45, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Dave's Operating System

 * Moved from article page Red rose64 (talk) 20:37, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

My understanding of DOS is that it originally meant "Dave's Operating System". Dave was a realator in San Francisco who played with computers as a hobby. When Bill Gates signed the deal with IBM for an operating system, he did not have one. He was however aware of Dave's system. Unlike Gate's licensing deal with IBM, Gate bought the operating system for $25,000 from Dave. The system was really in the infant stages but it immedialely gave Microsoft a platform to develop "DOS, Disk Operating System.

I obtained this information first from a PBS TV program and since have talked with several former IBM employees who confirmed the story. I would say that it still needs further investigation for accuracy, however if true is a fascinating insight on how Microsoft started. Capn BJ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.248.73.119 (talk) 16:47, 31 December 2011‎
 * I'm afraid, you are mixing up a few things here. You are talking about Microsoft and MS-DOS, however, the term "DOS" for Disk Operating System long pre-dates the advent of MS-DOS, and was used by many operating systems completely unrelated to MS-DOS at the time (and that's what this article is about). Also, the operating system offered by Microsoft as MS-DOS (and by IBM as PC DOS) had its origins in 86-DOS, an operating system developed by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) as a rudimentary clone of Digital Research's CP/M (aka CP/M-80), but ported to run on 8080/8086 processors (and with two significant differences: a different disk buffer mechanism and the introduction of the FAT12 filesystem), whereas Digital Research's CP/M itself was only available for 8080/Z80 processors. CP/M-86 for 8086/8088 processors was not available when 86-DOS development started in 1979 (still called QDOS at this time), but it was available in 1981 at about the same time as IBM began shipping the IBM PC. If you are interested in the early history of MS-DOS, please make yourself familiar with 86-DOS. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:30, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

How does a Disk Operating System differ from an Operating System?
From the description it's not clear.


 * ... refer to an operating system software used in most computers that provides the abstraction and management of secondary storage devices and the information on them (e.g., file systems for organizing files of all sorts). Such software is referred to as a disk operating system when the storage devices it manages are made of rotating platters, such as floppy disks or hard disks.

Abstracting and management of storage is something that all Operating Systems do.

173.13.156.125 (talk) 18:44, 10 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Well, the difference is whether "the storage devices it manages are made of rotating platters, such as floppy disks or hard disks" - but that makes a lot of operating systems not listed here "disk operating systems". The criterion for listing in "Disk operating systems that were extensions to the OS" and "Disk operating systems that were the main OS" appears to be "do they have either "DOS" or "Disk" in their names", which is bogus, because there are and were a lot of operating systems where "the storage devices [they manage] are made of rotating platters, such as floppy disks or hard disks" that aren't listed here (and because, for example, the operating system on the machine on which I'm typing this started out managing rotating-platter storage devices, but the main storage on the machine on which I'm typing this is flash storage). Guy Harris (talk) 19:57, 13 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Heck, for that matter, IBM had DOS/360 and OS/360 as (near-)contemporary OSes for System/360 ("near-" because DOS/360 came out before OS/360 finally shipped, but once OS/360 shipped, they were both offered, with DOS/360 being for lower-end machines that couldn't run OS/360 or couldn't run it well). Both were operating systems that can manage storage devices made of rotating platters and, I think, both were operating systems that required rotating-platter storage.  (TOS/360 was an OS that supported using just tapes; it may have been "DOS/360 without the disk support".  I don't think it lasted very long.)


 * So the concept of a "disk operating system" is spectacularly ill-defined, so I'm not sure why it deserves a Wikipedia page. A more narrowly-defined concept might deserve a page, e.g. the concept of an operating system from the early microcomputer days, for some appropriately-defined value of "early", that supports disk file systems might deserve a page.  I'm not sure whether 1981 would be too late for an appropriate definition of "early", thus ruling out DOS as a Disk Operating System; I'd require that "early" refer to an era in which there were significant operating systems that didn't use disks, e.g. cassette-tape-based OSes. Guy Harris (talk) 07:05, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

definition does not apply to modern os?
The introduction defines a disk operating system as one that can use a storage disk, presumably in contrast to punch cards etc. It then claims that "Strictly speaking, this definition does not apply to current generations of operating systems". However, most well-known modern operating systems support storage disks, file systems, booting from such disks etc. In fact, the only exceptions I can think of are embedded operating systems. Maybe the introduction should be changed to "Strictly speaking, this definition also applies to current generations of operating systems, such as versions of Microsoft Windows in use, but it is almost exclusively used for older generations of operating systems." 2A02:8070:E289:7500:75F8:2A20:E5DC:1067 (talk) 17:22, 9 February 2018 (UTC)