Skip to Main Content
Idaho State University home

Glossary

Filter:
# A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z All
M
M
MAC
MAN
MD5
MDC
Meg
MEP
MER
Mgt
MHS
MHz
MI
MIB
MLS
MOA
Mod
MOE
MOP
MOU
MRK
MRT
MSE
MTR
MTT
Mu
MUD
MUX
Mw
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, who is said to have regretted it ever since. Numerous features, including vaguely UNIX-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into 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 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-DOSJust say No!"). See mess-dos, ill-behaved.