Ernie Smith is a former contributor to EdTech and a tech history nut who researches vintage operating systems for fun. Given all the options for computing in the modern day — tablets, laptops and ...

Update, July 5, 2021: It's the July 4 holiday weekend in the US, which means Ars staff gets a well-deserved holiday to catch up on this summer's Steam sale (or maybe just to rest). As such, we're ...

The Book 8088 was a neat experiment, but as a clone of the original IBM PC, it was pretty limited in what it could do. Early MS-DOS apps and games worked fine, and the very first Windows versions ran… ...

After a lot of debugging, [Seth Kushniryk] has managed to get the last issuess shaken out of his port of MS-DOS 2.0 to the Apple II, and has released the project to the public. If you have the ...

Gary Kildall started Intergalactic Digital Research (later shortened to Digital Research or just DRI) and created the first microcomputer operating system, CP/M, used on many hobbyist personal ...

Strictly-speaking modern x86 computers running Windows should be compatible with any software written for the very first MS-DOS PCs starting with the original IBM PC and its clones. In practice, it's ...

DR-DOS is back, and there is already a test version you can download. But as of yet, it's not finished, not FOSS – and not based on the original code.… The long-dormant DR-DOS.com website is alive ...

In context: Back in 1980, Tim Paterson was creating a new operating system he called QDOS or Quick and Dirty Operating System. The system was later renamed 86-DOS, as it was being designed to run on ...

When old programmers like me (I'm 41) get together we talk about the applications from the old days. What happens to these beauties? The answer, obviously, is that their fate only matters if people ...