Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Before Windows, there was MS-DOS—that’s the Microsoft Disk ...

Unlock the full InfoQ experience by logging in! Stay updated with your favorite authors and topics, engage with content, and download exclusive resources. This article dives into the happens-before ...

Windows 3.0 arrived in 1990, offering a much refined interface making use of 16 colors, better resource management, and ...

Before Windows introduced its modern GUI system, Microsoft was well-known for its iconic command-line operating system, MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

I recently said that an MS-DOS boot disk couldn’t be created in Windows 2000. As several readers pointed out, this isn’t quite true. An MS-DOS boot disk can be created using files located on the ...

Recently, we have been covering quite a lot of retro stuff for Windows which shows how modern apps have their roots in the '90s. If you are a fan of the bygone era of Windows, you are likely to be ...

Last month, Microsoft released a modern remake of its classic MS-DOS Editor, bringing back a piece of computing history that first appeared in MS-DOS 5.0 back in 1991. The new open source tool, built ...

Editor’s note: After this article was published, Microsoft issued a statement clarifying that cmd.exe will not be going away after all. Read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ follow-up column. My very first ...

What was Microsoft’s best Windows operating system of all time? If you’re like us, you have…opinions. Even if you’re not the type to parse through all of the little details that separated Windows 98 ...

Microsoft, like any company, has its detractors. Everyone from computer scientists to people who just hate Windows 10 have gone after it at some point. But an old, ugly rumor has just come back, with ...

If Bill Gates is known for founding Microsoft and building it into one of the world’s most powerful companies, Paul Allen might be best known for founding Microsoft — and then, in 1983, walking away.