The design decisions behind the popular operating system
Tim Paterson
Seattle Computer Products
The purpose of a personal computer operating system is to provide the user with basic control of the machine. A less obvious function is to furnish the user with a high-level, machine-independent interface for application programs, so that those programs can run on two dissimilar machines, despite the differences in their peripheral hardware. Having designed an 8086 microprocessor card for the S-100 bus and not finding an appropriate disk operating system on the market, Seattle Computer Products set about designing MS-DOS. Today MS-DOS is the most widely used disk operating system for personal computers based on Intel's 8086 and 8088 microprocessors.