microsoft struck a deal with ibm to provide dos operating system.
microsoft struck a deal with ibm to provide dos operating system.
who did microsoft strike a deal with to provide dos operating system?
ibm
microsoft, having worked with scp before and seeking an operating system they could modify for the ibm pc, bought the rights to market the 86-dos operating system to other manufacturers for $25,000 that same month. on july 27, 1981, just prior to the august 12 pc launch, microsoft bought the full rights to the operating system for an additional $50,000, giving scp a perpetual royalty-free license to sell 86-dos (including updated versions) with its computer hardware. realizing that microsoft was making significant profit on the 86-dos operating system, scp attempted to sell it along with a stand-alone inexpensive cpu (without any other circuitry). this was allowed as per scp's license with microsoft, which let scp sell the operating system with their 8086-based computers; this operating system was marketed as "seattle dos", and a cpu was included in the box it shipped in.
seattle computer products
in contrast to the windows 9x series, the windows nt-derived 32-bit operating systems developed alongside the 9x series (windows nt, 2000, xp and newer) do not contain ms-dos as part of the operating system, as nt is not built as a subsystem running on dos but an entirely different independent operating system, but provide a subset of dos emulation to run dos applications and provide dos-like command prompt windows. 64-bit versions of windows nt line do not provide dos emulation and cannot run dos applications natively. windows xp contains a copy of the windows me boot disk, stripped down to bootstrap only. this is accessible only by formatting a floppy as an "ms-dos startup disk". files like the driver for the cd-rom support were deleted from the windows me bootdisk and the startup files (autoexec.bat and config.sys) no longer had content. this modified disk was the base for creating the ms-dos image for windows xp. some of the deleted files can be recovered with an undelete tool. when booting up an ms-dos startup disk made with windows xp's format tool, the version reports as "windows millenium," and not "ms-dos 8.0" (which was used as the base for windows 98 and me but never released as a stand alone product). with windows vista the files on the startup disk are dated april 18, 2005 but are otherwise unchanged, including the string "ms-dos version 8 copyright 1981–1999 microsoft corp" inside codice_1. starting with windows 10, the ability to create a dos startup disk has been removed and so either a virtual machine running ms-dos or an older version (in a virtual machine or dual boot) must be used to format a floppy disk, or an image must be obtained from an external source. other solutions include using dos compatible alternatives, such as freedos or even copying the required files and boot sector themselves.
ms-dos